Events Archive

How is living matter organized in space and time during multicellular morphogenesis? A comparative view across animals and plants suggests that the answer may lie in reusing just a few geometric and topological organ-sculpting motifs. Using examples, I will discuss the qualitative and quantitative basis for three of these motifs: elongation,...

I will discuss recent developments regarding new types of hadrons involving heavy quarks: hadronic molecules, doubly heavy baryons, stable tetraquarks and others. I will also explain how the discovery of the doubly heavy baryon leads to quark-level analogue of nuclear fusion, with energy release per reaction an order of magnitude greater than...

Embryology at the beginning of the 21st century finds itself in a situation similar to neurobiology; the behavior of the component pieces is understood in some detail, but how they self-assemble to become life is still very hazy.

When cooled fast enough to avoid crystallization, a liquid becomes increasingly viscous and eventually forms a glass. This “glass transition,” one of the oldest unsolved problems in condensed-matter physics, gives rise to a wide diversity of views. Accordingly, there is a lack of agreement on which would be the most profitable theoretical...

Black holes are fascinating objects which pose interesting puzzles for quantum physics. Studying these puzzles we are led to quantum mechanical models that describe special black holes as seen from the outside. Extrapolating from these descriptions we conclude that entanglement can create geometric connections or wormholes.

Biologists have recently come to appreciate that eukaryotic cells are home to a multiplicity of non-membrane bound compartments, many of which form and dissolve as needed for the cell to function. These dynamical “liquid droplets” enable many central cellular functions – from ribosome assembly, to RNA regulation and storage, to signaling and...

Higher-spin gravity is a generalization of Einstein's general relativity, which involves towers of interacting massless fields of arbitrarily high spin. It has an infinite dimensional higher-spin gauge symmetry, and can be consistently constructed in the presence of a non-zero cosmological constant.

Interactions between particles in quantum many-body systems can lead to a collective behavior. In a condensed matter system consisting of weakly interacting particles, a propagating particle interacting with its surroundings can be viewed as a ‘dressed’ quasiparticle with renormalized mass and other dynamic properties.

I will present our recent work building matter from light, beginning with a realization of Landau levels for optical photons in a non-planar (twisted) optical resonator and studying the impact of placing these photons in curved space.