Come enjoy delicious appetizers and good conversation with students, faculty, postdocs, and staff in the physics and astrophysics departments!

8:45-9:00 Coffee & Light Breakfast
9:00-9:15 Welcome and Introductions
                     Jason Petta - "Host of Summit"
                    Herman Verlinde
                    Pablo Debenedetti
9:15-9:45 The full stack – quantum information science and engineering…

The properties of the smallest gravitationally-bound dark matter structures can be affected by non-trivial particle physics within the dark sector, and thus could provide the first hints of the non-gravitational interactions of dark matter. As our knowledge of Galactic stellar kinematics grows, we are discovering streams and debris consistent…

Join your peers for facilitated small-group discussions in a low-pressure setting and be equipped with concrete ways to be allies to women and minorities in STEM.  

Refreshments will be served.

All undergrads, grads, postdocs, staff, and faculty are welcome!

Facilitators: Prof. Mariangela Lisanti, Prof. James Olsen…

Critical points of classical second-order phase transitions are thermodynamic phenomena of particular interest, driven by thermal fluctuations and characterized by emergent scale invariance and universal power-law correlations. At zero temperature quantum fluctuations can similarly drive sharp phase transitions between qualitatively distinct…

Cosmological hypotheses and oracular dreams of grandly unifying all the forces of nature foretold: neutrinos might weigh a tiny bit, those elusive particles might blow up stars, and the protons (and your ashes) would transform into light in 1029 years.  Indeed, that man can live to 100, without the radioactivity in his bones killing him,…

Jo Dunkley combines her expertise as an astrophysicist with her talents as a teacher and writer in this lively and exceptionally clear introduction to the structure and history of the universe and its enduring mysteries. Please join us. Full event details.

Jo Dunkley…

The most pressing fine-tuning puzzles of the Standard Model — the cosmological constant and weak hierarchy problems, as well as the Higgs metastability —  can all be understood as problems of near criticality. I will present a natural selection mechanism based on search optimization on the string landscape. The…

We present recent advances in constructions of globally consistent F-theory compactifications with the exact chiral spectrum of the minimal supersymmetric Standard Model. We highlight the first such example and then turn to a subsequent systematic exploration of the landscape of F-theory three-family Standard Models with a gauge coupling…

Anomalies are invariants under renormalization group flow which lead to powerful constraints on the phases of quantum field theories.  I will explain how these ideas can be generalized to families of theories labelled by coupling constants like the theta angle in gauge theory.  Using these ideas we will be able to prove that certain systems,…

Implications for the Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background from a Massive Quasar-binary The collective inspirals of very close-separation supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are expected to produce a stochastic gravitational wave background (GWB) at nHz frequencies, which is accessible to pulsar timing arrays. However, we have…

The LIGO/VIRGO collaboration has just started their observing run 3. I will first give an introduction to gravitational wave searches and the events that have been found so far and describe some of the interesting astrophysics problems that might be addressed in the coming few years. Together with the rest of the IAS team, I will then describe…

The one-dimensional AKLT spin chain is the prototypical example of a frustration-free quantum spin system with a spectral gap above its ground state. Affleck, Kennedy, Lieb, and Tasaki conjectured that the two-dimensional version of their model on the hexagonal lattice also  exhibits a spectral gap. In this talk, we introduce a family of…

It has been recently pointed out that variable weak gravitational lensing effects on the motion of background stars can be used to probe nonluminous structures inside the Milky Way halo. I will describe one possible detection strategy targeting collapsed dark matter structures in the mass range from million to…

I will discuss new universal bounds on the spectra of two-dimensional unitary, compact conformal field theories coming from the modular bootstrap. In the presence of a twist gap amongst the Virasoro primary operators (where twist is defined as the difference between total conformal dimension and spin), I will show that there is a universal…

My talk will aim to be a friendly introduction for condensed matter friends, mathematicians, and QFT theorists alike ---  I shall quickly review and warm up the use of higher symmetries and anomalies of gauge theories and condensed matter systems. Then I will present the results of recent work [arXiv:1904.00994].

We explore 4d time…