Abstract: Active crystals are highly ordered structures that emerge from the nonequilibrium self-organization of motile objects, and have been widely studied in synthetic and bacterial active matter. In this talk, I will describe how swimming sea star embryos spontaneously assemble into chiral crystals that span thousands of spinning organisms and persist for tens of hours. Combining […]
Title: The Kervaire conjecture and the minimal complexity of surfaces Abstract: We use topological methods to solve special cases of a fundamental problem in group theory, the Kervaire conjecture. The conjecture asserts that, for any nontrivial group G and any element w in the free product G*Z, the quotient (G*Z)/<<w>> is still nontrivial. We interpret this […]
Member Seminar Speaker: Gabriel Wong Title: Universal relations between entanglement, symmetries, and entropy Abstract: Entanglement is an essential property of quantum systems that distinguishes them from classical ones. It is responsible for the nonlocal character of quantum information and provides a resource for quantum teleportation and quantum computation. In this talk I will provide an introduction […]
Speaker: Jeongwan Haah (Microsoft) Title: A degeneracy bound for homogeneous topological order https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjHJa-hy-3o
This week’s seminar will be an open mic discussion which will be led by Nima Arkani-Hamed (IAS), and by Gary Shiu (UW-Madison), and the topic will be “Swampland constraints, Unitarity and Causality”. They will start with a brief introduction sharing their thoughts about the topic and moderate a discussion afterwards.
Abstract: I will describe an inductive algorithm computing Gromov-Witten invariants in all genera with arbitrary insertions of all smooth complete intersections in projective space. The main idea is to show that invariants with insertions of primitive cohomology classes are controlled by their monodromy and by invariants defined without primitive insertions but with imposed nodes in the […]
Speaker: Jie Wang (Simons Foundation) Title: Quantum Geometric Aspects of Chiral Twisted Graphene Models Abstract: “Moire” materials produced by stacking monolayers with small relative twist angles are of intense current interest for the range of correlated electron phenomena they exhibit. The quench of the kinetic energy means that the interacting physics is controlled by the interplay between […]
Speaker: Andrea Brini, U Sheffield Title: Curve counting on surfaces and topological strings Abstract: Enumerative geometry is a venerable subfield of Mathematics, with roots dating back to Greek Antiquity and a present inextricably linked with developments in other domains. Since the early 90s, in particular, the interaction with String Theory has sent shockwaves through the subject, giving […]
Title: Amplituhedra, Scattering Amplitudes and Triangulations Abstract: In this talk I will discuss about Amplituhedra – generalizations of polytopes inside the Grassmannian – recently introduced by physicists as new geometric constructions encoding interactions of elementary particles in certain Quantum Field Theories. In particular, I will explain how the problem of finding triangulations of Amplituhedra is connected to […]