# Physics Events

• Monday, April 22, 2019
High Energy Theory Seminar
“A New Twist on the Modular Bootstrap”

Location: Jadwin Hall, PCTS Seminar Room, 4th Floor
Time: 2:30 PM
Speaker(s): Nathan Benjamin, Princeton University

Description: 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 expression for the density of states that extends beyond the usual Cardy regime. I will also describe a new upper bound on the lowest twist primary operator present in any CFT. For theories holographically dual to large-radius gravity in $AdS_3$, this new bound is below the BTZ threshold, which implies that states that cannot be described as BTZ black holes must exist.

• Tuesday, April 23, 2019
Pheno & Vino Seminar
“Astrometric Weak Lensing from Dark Matter Substructures”

Time: 4:00 PM
Speaker(s): Christina Mondino, New York University

Description: 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 billion solar masses. The data analysis technique will be discussed in detail with an application to Gaia's second data release.

• Wednesday, April 24, 2019
Physics Group Meeting
“The Current State of Gravitational Wave Searches with LIGO/VIRGO”

Location: Bloomberg Lecture Hall
Time: 1:45 PM
Speaker(s): Matias Zaldarriaga, Faculty, School of Natural Sciences, IAS

Description: 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 results of the searches for new events in the publicly available LIGO data that we have carried out (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.10331.pdf, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.07214.pdf, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.10341.pdf). These searches have nearly doubled the catalog of binary black hole mergers.

• Thursday, April 25, 2019
PCTS Conference
“Strongly Correlated Systems and Interactions in Quantum Matter”

Location: PCTS Seminar Room Jadwin Hall, Fourth Floor, Room 407
Time: 12:00 PM
Speaker(s): Program Organizers: Andrei Bernevig, Bob Cava, Biao Lian, Ali Yazdani, Yizhi You
Note: Registration is full and is now closed. Please watch the talks on the live stream.

Description: Understanding strongly interacting quantum many-body systems is one of the central challenges of condensed matter physics. The strong correlations of interacting quantum systems can lead to incredibly rich phase diagrams, and various intertwined or competing orders. The goal of this workshop is to bring together experimental and theoretical experts to synthesize the recent developments in interacting condensed matter systems, and to forge the future directions of the field. Several highlighted topics of the workshop include (but not limited to): superconductivity and correlated insulating phases in twisted bilayer graphene and other Moire systems, topological and interacting states in partially occupied Landau levels, and recent progress in the studies of high-temperature superconductors.

This workshop is co-sponsored by the Department of Physics and PCCM and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

This conference will be live streamed and can be viewed at this link.
http://www.kaltura.com/tiny/jxaqm

• Friday, April 26, 2019
PCTS Conference
“Strongly Correlated Systems and Interactions in Quantum Matter”

Location: PCTS Seminar Room Jadwin Hall, Fourth Floor, Room 407
Time: 8:30 AM
Speaker(s): Program Organizers: Andrei Bernevig, Bob Cava, Biao Lian, Ali Yazdani, Yizhi You
Note: Registration is full and is now closed. Please watch the talks on the live stream.

Description: Understanding strongly interacting quantum many-body systems is one of the central challenges of condensed matter physics. The strong correlations of interacting quantum systems can lead to incredibly rich phase diagrams, and various intertwined or competing orders. The goal of this workshop is to bring together experimental and theoretical experts to synthesize the recent developments in interacting condensed matter systems, and to forge the future directions of the field. Several highlighted topics of the workshop include (but not limited to): superconductivity and correlated insulating phases in twisted bilayer graphene and other Moire systems, topological and interacting states in partially occupied Landau levels, and recent progress in the studies of high-temperature superconductors.

This workshop is co-sponsored by the Department of Physics and PCCM and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

This conference will be live streamed and can be viewed at this link.
http://www.kaltura.com/tiny/jxaqm

• Friday, April 26, 2019
High Energy Theory Seminar
“TBA”

Location: Bloomberg Lecture Hall
Time: 1:45 PM
Speaker(s): Clay Cordova, Member, School of Natural Sciences, IAS

Description:

• Saturday, April 27, 2019
PCTS Conference
“Strongly Correlated Systems and Interactions in Quantum Matter”

Location: PCTS Seminar Room Jadwin Hall, Fourth Floor, Room 407
Time: 8:30 AM
Speaker(s): Program Organizers: Andrei Bernevig, Bob Cava, Biao Lian, Ali Yazdani, Yizhi You
Note: Registration is full and is now closed. Please watch the talks on the live stream.

Description: Understanding strongly interacting quantum many-body systems is one of the central challenges of condensed matter physics. The strong correlations of interacting quantum systems can lead to incredibly rich phase diagrams, and various intertwined or competing orders. The goal of this workshop is to bring together experimental and theoretical experts to synthesize the recent developments in interacting condensed matter systems, and to forge the future directions of the field. Several highlighted topics of the workshop include (but not limited to): superconductivity and correlated insulating phases in twisted bilayer graphene and other Moire systems, topological and interacting states in partially occupied Landau levels, and recent progress in the studies of high-temperature superconductors.

This workshop is co-sponsored by the Department of Physics and PCCM and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

This conference will be live streamed and can be viewed at this link.
http://www.kaltura.com/tiny/jxaqm

• Sunday, April 28, 2019
PCTS Conference
“Strongly Correlated Systems and Interactions in Quantum Matter”

Location: PCTS Seminar Room Jadwin Hall, Fourth Floor, Room 407
Time: 8:30 AM
Speaker(s): Program Organizers: Andrei Bernevig, Bob Cava, Biao Lian, Ali Yazdani, Yizhi You
Note: Registration is full and is now closed. Please watch the talks on the live stream.

Description: Understanding strongly interacting quantum many-body systems is one of the central challenges of condensed matter physics. The strong correlations of interacting quantum systems can lead to incredibly rich phase diagrams, and various intertwined or competing orders. The goal of this workshop is to bring together experimental and theoretical experts to synthesize the recent developments in interacting condensed matter systems, and to forge the future directions of the field. Several highlighted topics of the workshop include (but not limited to): superconductivity and correlated insulating phases in twisted bilayer graphene and other Moire systems, topological and interacting states in partially occupied Landau levels, and recent progress in the studies of high-temperature superconductors.

This workshop is co-sponsored by the Department of Physics and PCCM and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

This conference will be live streamed and can be viewed at this link.
http://www.kaltura.com/tiny/jxaqm

• Monday, April 29, 2019
Gravity Initiative Lunch
“TBA”

Time: 12:30 PM
Speaker(s): Felicity Eperon, University of Cambridge

• Monday, April 29, 2019
High Energy Theory Seminar
“TBA”

Location: Bloomberg Lecture Hall
Time: 2:30 PM
Speaker(s): Mirjam Cvetic, University of Pennsylvania

Description:

• Tuesday, April 30, 2019
Pheno & Vino Seminar
“Search Optimization, Natural Selection and Self-Organized Criticality on the Landscape”

Time: 4:00 PM
Speaker(s): Justin Khoury, University of Pennsylvania

Description: 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 working assumption is that cosmological evolution on the multiverse has occurred for a finite time, much shorter than the exponentially-long global mixing time for the landscape. I will argue this imposes a strong selection pressure among hospitable vacua, favoring those that lie in optimal regions where the search algorithm is efficient. This satisfies the basic requirements for natural selection: a diverse gene pool, offered ab initio by the landscape; vacuum replication through cosmological expansion; and competition for a finite resource, namely the fraction of comoving volume. Optimality is defined by two competing requirements: search efficiency, which requires minimizing the mean-first passage time, and sweeping exploration, which requires recurrent random walks. Optimal landscape regions reach a compromise by lying at the critical boundary between recurrence and transience, thereby realizing the idea of self-organized criticality. The framework makes concrete phenomenological predictions: 1. The expected lifetime of our universe is ~10^{130} years, consistent with current Standard Model metastability estimates; 2. The SUSY breaking scale should be nearly Planckian; and 3. The predicted cosmological constant is M_Pl^4/N, which can account for the inferred vacuum energy if our optimal region contains N ~10^{120} vacua. Importantly, these predictions do not rely on anthropic reasoning and instead follow readily from optimality.

• Monday, May 6, 2019
High Energy Theory Seminar
“TBA”

Location: Jadwin Hall, PCTS Seminar Room, 4th Floor
Time: 2:30 PM
Speaker(s): Joseph Maciejko, University of Alberta

• Monday, May 13, 2019
High Energy Theory Seminar
“TBA”

Location: Bloomberg Lecture Hall
Time: 2:30 PM
Speaker(s): TBA

• Tuesday, May 28, 2019
High Energy Theory Seminar
“TBA”

Location: Jadwin Hall, PCTS Seminar Room, 4th Floor
Time: 2:00 PM
Speaker(s): Natalia Pinzani-Fokeeva, KU Leuven

Description: