Calendar

The out-of-time-ordered correlation (OTOC) and entanglement are two physically motivated and widely used probes of the “scrambling” of quantum information, a phenomenon that has drawn great interest recently in quantum gravity and many-body physics. We argue that the corresponding notions of scrambling can be fundamentally different, by proving an asymptotic separation between the time scales of the saturation of OTOC and that of entanglement entropy in a random quantum circuit model defined on graphs with a tight bottleneck, such as tree graphs connected at the roots. Our result counters the intuition that a random quantum circuit mixes in time proportional to the diameter of the underlying graph of interactions. It also provides a more rigorous justification for an argument of arXiv:1807.04363, that black holes may be slow information scramblers. Such observations may be of fundamental importance in the understanding of the black hole information problem. The bounds we obtained for OTOC are interesting in their own right in that they generalize previous studies of OTOC on lattices to the geometries on graphs in a rigorous and general fashion.

In 2008, Christodoulou achieved a major breakthrough in the context of mathematical general relativity in being able to form trapped surfaces dynamically from initial data for the Einstein vacuum system. The results and methods which he lays out in his 600+ page manuscript has led to a flurry of activity in the last decade. I will give a rough overview of the basic ideas, describe how far theorems have come, and describe some recent progress – joint with Nikos Athanasiou – in this direction.

–Organized by Professor Shing-Tung Yau

I will briefly review the pseudogap phenomenology in high Tc cuprate superconductors, especially recent experiments related to charge density waves and pair density waves, and propose a simple theory of the pseudogap. By quantum disordering a pair density wave, we found a state composed of insulating antinodal pairs and a nodal electron pocket. We compare the theoretical predictions with ARPES results, optical conductivity, quantum oscillation and other experiments.

We consider the family of normal octic fields with Galois group $D_4$, ordered by their discriminant. In forthcoming joint work with Arul Shankar, we verify the strong form of Malle’s conjecture for this family of number fields, obtaining the order of growth as well as the constant of proportionality. In this talk, we will discuss and review the combination of techniques from analytic number theory and geometry-of-numbers methods used to prove this and related results.

Can you use the homotopy type of the space of knots in a simply-connected 4-manifold to distinguish smooth structures? The answer is no, using embedding calculus. I will also give some examples which show that embedding calculus does distinguish smooth structures in high dimensions. This is joint with Ben Knudsen.

Max Dehn made many remarkable contributions to mathematics, and his name pops up in lots of places, most often in topology, where we have “Dehn surgery”, the “Dehn twist”, and “Dehn’s lemma”. Famously, Dehn supplied an incorrect proof of the lemma that bears his name. The mistake wasn’t noticed for nearly a decade, and took nearly another four decades to fix. In this talk, I won’t mention the lemma, but I will say a few words about Dehn himself, a few more about his early work on “scissors congruences”, and then yet more on the Dehn twist, closing with a recent result about Dehn twists in four dimensions. (This talk will be accessible to members of the department at all levels.)

Quantum money is a cryptographic protocol for quantum computers. A quantum money protocol consists of a quantum state which can be created (by the mint) and verified (by anybody with a quantum computer who knows what the “serial number” of the money is), but which cannot be duplicated, even by somebody with a copy of the quantum state who knows the verification protocol. Several previous proposals have been made for quantum money protocols. We will discuss the history of quantum money and give a protocol which cannot be broken unless lattice cryptosystems are insecure.

Higher symmetries can emerge at low energies in a topologically ordered state with no symmetry, when some topological excitations have very high energy scales while other topological excitations have low energies.  The low energy properties of topological orders in this limit, with the emergent higher symmetries, may be described by higher symmetry protected topological order. This motivates us, as a simplest example, to study a lattice model of $Z_n$-1-symmetry protected topological (1-SPT) states in 3+1D for even $n$. We write down an exactly solvable lattice model and study its boundary transformation. On the boundary, we show the existence of anyons with non-trivial self-statistics.  For the $n=2$ case, where the bulk classification is given by an integer $m$ mod 4, we show that the boundary can be gapped with double semion topological order for $m=1$ and toric code for $m=2$. The bulk ground state wavefunction amplitude is given in terms of the linking numbers of loops in the dual lattice.  Our construction can be generalized to arbitrary 1-SPT protected by finite unitary symmetry.

No additional detail for this event.

The Event Horizon Telescope image of the supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87 is dominated by a bright, unresolved ring.  General relativity predicts that embedded within this image lies a thin “photon ring,” which is itself composed of an infinite sequence of self-similar subrings.  Each subring is a lensed image of the main emission, indexed by the number of photon orbits executed around the black hole.  I will review recent theoretical advances in our understanding of lensing by Kerr black holes, based on arXiv:1907.04329, 1910.12873, and 1910.12881.  In particular, I will describe the critical parameters γ, δ, and τ that respectively control the demagnification, rotation, and time delay of successive lensed images of a source.  These observable parameters encode universal effects of general relativity, which are independent of the details of the emitting matter and also produce strong, universal signatures on long interferometric baselines.  These signatures offer the possibility of precise measurements of black hole mass and spin, as well as tests of general relativity, using only a sparse interferometric array such as a future extension of the EHT to space