Archive of IAS Physics Group Meetings

Nov
08
2017

Physics Group Meeting

Singularities and the Amplituhedron
1:45pm
Modern methods for computing scattering amplitudes getenormous mileage out of knowledge of (or, often, even assumptions about) their singularity structure. I will demonstrate how, in the case of N=4 SYM theory, information about this singularity...
Oct
25
2017

Physics Group Meeting

Boundary State Black Holes: Escapability and Reconstruction of the Interior
1:45pm
Boundary state black holes are single sided pure black holeswith an End-of-the-World Brane cutting off the spacetime in the interior. I demonstrate that certain Hamiltonian deformations tuned to the black hole microstate inject negative energy...
Oct
11
2017

Physics Group Meeting

Delineating the Swampland via the Weak Gravity Conjecture
Tom Rudelius
1:45pm
The set of low-energy effective theories that do not admit an ultraviolet completion in string theory is known as the ``swampland." Developing criteria to determine which effective theories belong in the string landscape and which ones belong in...
Sep
27
2017

Physics Group Meeting

Markovian Property of Vacuum State and the a-theorem
1:45pm
The vacuum state reduced to a region of the space gives a density matrix which can be written in a thermal-like form. In this "thermal" density matrix the role of the Hamiltonian is played by the so called entanglement or modular Hamiltonian...
May
17
2017

Physics Group Meeting

A few basics of deep learning
Dima Krotov
1:45pm
I will give an elementary introduction to neural network models commonly used in deep learning. These include feed-forward neural networks, recurrent neural networks and memory models. If time permits, a few open problems in the field will also be...
May
10
2017

Physics Group Meeting

Link Invariants and Topological Quantum Matter
1:45pm
Gauging of bosonic and fermionic symmetry protected topological (SPT) states with discrete symmetry produces simple yet non-trivial topological quantum field theories (TQFTs). Some of the natural observables in such TQFTs are expectation values of...
Apr
26
2017

Physics Group Meeting

On the Operator Content of dS
1:45pm
We discuss the operator content of an asymptotic dS universe, using as an example the Vasiliev theory of massless interacting higher spin particles in a dS vacuum.
Apr
12
2017

Physics Group Meeting

Why the Energy Density is Positive
1:45pm
A physical system is stable if its Hamiltonian is bounded below, so that we can define a positive notion of "energy" relative to the ground state. But what about the local energy density - can that be negative? I will provide an elegant derivation...
Mar
29
2017

Physics Group Meeting

Algebraic EE and Holography
1:45pm
In the first part of the talk, I’ll explore whether EE’s of subalgebras not organized by position space in a holographic CFT may be useful for bulk reconstruction. In particular I'll explain how the lengths of non-minimal geodesics in AdS3 conical...