Nobel prize for the blue LED or finding a blue light emiting superconductor

The blue LED discovery, short for light emitting diodes, has been awarded today the Nobel prize in physics today. These (in red and green) have been around since 1962, but what makes the blue LED worth the prize is that it was the missing link to be blended and generate white light. The awardees managed to produce the elusive superconductor - by growing high-quality crystals of gallium nitride - producing blue light. The disputes around the discovery, royalties and multimillionaire lawsuits is also very complex.

Now, this week looks much more relaxed here at Harvard. Last week's schedule included two colloquiums - Xi Yin and also Andy Strominger in the math department - plus Seiberg's talk. We also held the High Energy Journal Club where Xi Yin talked about classicalization in Ultra-Planckian 2->N Scattering.

Physics visits and retreat

This past week I visited Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. The coolest looking theoretical physics building has a vibrant scientific live. It is impossible to miss a spot to discuss; almost every wall has a blackboard. You can see my talk (click here): Force-Free Electrodynamics around Extreme Kerr Black Hole. It was a fun visit and hope to return in the future.

Next to my first prize poster at Harvard Physics Scholar Retreat, Sep 18, 2014.

Also, Harvard held its yearly Harvard Physics Research Scholar Retreat. This time we went to Andover-MA and enjoyed a great day learning what the other groups at the Physics Department are currently working on. Among the activities there was a poster session too in which I participated . For the dinner we invited Alan Guth, which shared a lot of his experiences not only as a successful physicist but also about his postdochood. Maybe, the most exciting piece of news for me was that my poster won the first prize! You can see me next to my poster in the picture.

Academic year kickoff @Harvard

Summer is over: Harvard Law's outdoors barbecue closed last Friday. This week the Fall semester officially started @Harvard and with it seminars, colloquiums and meetings too - so lots of cookies and food are also back! To give you an idea of the hecticness here let me briefly describe this week's schedule

Tuesday September 2: lunch at Harvard's new Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications.
Wednesday September 3: lunch at the particle in-house seminar.
Thursday September 4: Research Scholar welcome dinner.
Friday September 5: Family Lunch seminars resumes with Cumrun (Vafa) as speaker
 on his latest paper: Non-unitary Holography.

Finally, the String Journal Club will soon resume. So keep posted for news!

Harvard turns into a Discovery Channel film set

As you all know, Andy Strominger and Cumrum Vafa recently received the 2014 Physics Frontiers Prize awarded by the Fundamental Physics Prize (Milner) Foundation. The winner of the $3Million prize will be announced LIVE on TV the 12th of December. After celebratory drinks in the Physics Library our lives went back to the usual exciting days where the printer is not working since the cartridge has to be changed. However, last Thursday the 4th Floor@Jefferson Labs was converted into a Discovery Channel film set (you can see some of the pics here) while the awardees, Strominger and Vafa, where interviewed for many hours.

Other things that happened recently where that Shiraz Minwalla came to visit Harvard and due to his talk the Journal Club had to be canceled. We resumed the Journal Club last week where Oscar Varela (postdoc @Harvard ) told as about "Subtracted geometry and irrelevant deformations".

Coffee area 4th Floor Jefferson Labs

Andy Strominger and Cumrum Vafa at the interview on 14th Nov 2013

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.