Two weeks of fancy physics

Two intensive weeks of physics of black holes are over. This year the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics in Ann Arbor organized the "Black Holes in String Theory Workshop" which I attended. It was a very productive meeting in which most of the discussions and talks were on black holes, fuzzballs and entanglement.

Back in Cambridge on Friday I attended the Harvard Physics Postdoc Retreat which I was also co-organizing. Postdocs from all the areas of the Physics Department gave 10 minute presentations. And aside from a lot of delicious food we had also break-out (interaction) sessions and, a great trivia "science" game also scheduled for the day. Stephen Wolfram was the special guest at the Retreat's dinner (see pic below). In spite of saying that he did not remember any female physicist working in his team or that nowadays he is hiring more IT-graduates than physicists, hearing about his experience as entrepreneur was extremely interesting. In all, the meeting was a success and we are all now looking forward to the 2014 edition!

Stephen Wolfram at the Harvard Physics Postdoc Retreat dinner - 18th Oct 2013

Meanwhile at Harvard ... the last two speakers at our High Energy Theory Group Journal Club were Paul Chesler "On the instability of asymptotically AdS spacetime" and Douglas Stanford telling us about "Black Holes and Butterfly effect" based on http://arxiv.org/abs/arXiv:1306.0622.

A week of prizes in theoretical physics

This past week, not only the Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics was awarded but just yesterday the Nobel prize in Physics, for "the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles", was announced.
The main difference in the prizes is the money involved! Last week I visited CEA-Saclay and during after lunch coffee I met Kosower, whom was very happy for the receipment of this year's Sakurai prize, and he mentioned that the prize was U$D10.000 divided by three (the number of awardees). In contrast, the Nobel prize in 2013 is U$D 1.235million (to be divided between Englert and Higgs).
The Nobel prize in physics -- that can only be awarded to at most three people -- this year is also somehow controversial. While the Sakurai prize for the "Higgs boson" was awarded in 2010 to the six authors of the symmetry breaking Physical Review Letters (PRL) paper saga of the summer of 1964, the Nobel committee left out the three authors on the last paper of the discovery. Let me remind you that the first paper was submitted by Englert and Brout (who passed away in 2011 and hence could not be awarded the Nobel prize). Then Higgs submitted his paper on Aug. 31 1964 and, 48 days later, Guralnik, Hagen and Kibbles submitted their paper to PRL (for more details you can browse an older post on my blog) which was published a month later.
There are also a lot of expectations regarding a Nobel prize for next year which is expected to be for the experimental discovery of the Higgs@CERN that this year was also not recognized.
In spite of all the drama and tension it is great to see that theoretical physics gets also a lot of recognition!

Before finishing my post let me just mention we had Thomas Dumitrescu at the High Energy Journal Club at Harvard telling us about "On Scale and Conformal Invariance in Four Dimensions" based on http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.2921

Flying around

I attended a very interesting conference last week in Mexico:  5th Garcia-Colin Mexican Meeting on Mathematical & Experimental Physics and ended up being interviewed at the press conference!

At the press conference of the 5th Garcia Colin -Mexican Meeting on Mathematical & Experimental Physic.

As I listened to the talks I realized how important the presentation of data was. The numerical relativity talks, with videos of merging black holes were definitely eye catching. As I searched the webs to find out which "outer-space" experiments are currently running I found this very cool chart called "Spacial awareness: Ultimate guide to exploring space" where the information is compiled beautifully.

Before ending this post let me just mention (as promised) that last week's journal club@ Harvard was led by Ben Heindereich. He talked about "Dimers and Orientifolds " based on http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.0298.

Journal Clubs - Harvard 2013/2014 edition

In all the research institutions I have worked at, Journal Clubs (JCs) are regularly organized aside from the usual seminars. JCs are weekly group meetings to discuss different papers listed recently on the arXiv. This year I am in charge of the organization of the Harvard High Energy Theory Journal Club. Today we had our own Babak Haghighat telling us about the connection of the rational CFTs to the torsion elements of the Bloch group. There was a lot of pizza and discussion; we hope to keep it up in the upcoming meetings.
Hope to report on the blog weekly about our upcoming JC meetings.

Black holes went hicking.

Several weeks of conferences and workshops are over and the coolest excursions including black hole physics discussions on the top of the Pyrenees (see picture) and copious meals of legendary lamb also came to an end.

String Theory Workshop 2013:
near Benasque, Spain at 2.400 meters in the Pyrenees.

There are currently many subjects in the spotlight, but judging from the number of talks at the most recent meetings the stress is on black holes -- or perhaps black hole alternatives? These include not only the so called fuzzball proposals, but also the recently proposed firewalls. On the latter subject there were at least three talks at Strings 2013! (click here to watch online) 

More discussions on these enlarged circle of ideas on the black hole information problem will go on at KITP mini workshop in a couple of weeks "Black Holes: Complementarity, Fuzz or Fire?" and programm.

What do String Theorists do over the Summer?

We held yesterday the last String Journal Club of the semester, and have two more weeks of seminars to officially start Summer-term at Harvard.  But for many, specially the senior faculty, this is the start of the most exciting period of the year: the summer Workshops and Conferences. The 2013 edition of the Strings Conference is in Korea and there are at least twelve other international meetings in June/July going on at the same time. Among them, the two week String Theory Workshop in Benasque-Spain starting the 30th of June. That is my choice for the summer, not just beacuse I am co-organizing it, but because it has been a great opportunity to discuss about physics and start new collaborations.



If you have no plans for the upcoming months you are welcome to apply. The deadline for the application is 1st of May (today!). Hope to see you all there.