2018 SUMMER
PROGRAM
* denotes the organizer
responsible for participant diversity in
the workshop
May 27 - September
16
Individual Research
Physicists are encouraged
to apply as individual researchers to work
on their own projects at Aspen Center for
Physics for up to five weeks at any time
during the summer. We provide a serene
atmosphere to complete work. The
individual researcher may also choose to
attend any workshop meetings or chat with
other scientists in residence in addition
to working on his or her own research.
Click here for more
information.
May
27 - September 16
Working Group
Working groups of between two and six
physicists are encouraged. Click here for more
information.
May
27 - June 17
From Physics to
Applications of Quantum Computers
Organizers:
Andrew Childs, University
of Maryland
Barbara Jones*, IBM
Research - Almaden
Chris Monroe, University
of Maryland
Matthias Troyer,
Microsoft Research
This workshop will be on
the physics of quantum computers and their
early applications, from a variety of
vantage points. We aim to attract
experimentalists, theorists, computational
physicists, as well as quantum information
theorists. In addition to advances in
quantum algorithms and computation, we
will cover the quantum simulation of
models in condensed matter, quantum
chemistry, and other fields. The dual
areas of qubit errors and fault-tolerance
will also be covered. By including both
theorists and experimentalists, we intend
to foster discussion more broadly on the
co-design of quantum applications with
various platforms (trapped ions and atoms,
superconducting qubits, quantum dots and
impurities in solids, and topological
states, etc.). Likewise, by bringing
together algorithm theorists with
computational physicists, we intend for
discussion and interplay to lead to
progress and new ways of thinking about
quantum application spaces.
May
27 - June 17
The Physics of
Behavior:
Movement, Control, and Learning
Organizers:
Gordon J. Berman, Emory
University
Daniel I. Goldman,
Georgia Institute of Technology
Stephanie E. Palmer,
University of Chicago
Greg J. Stephens, Vrije
Universiteit Amsterdam & Okinawa
Institute of Science and Technology
During the last 100 years, the interaction
of physical and life sciences has led to
tools and insights that have enabled
incredible advances in the discovery and
detailed description of the building
blocks that constitute living systems.
Relative to the study of these important
constituent parts, though, fewer
physicists have focused on the organizing
principles that govern whole-organism
behaviors. Recent studies have pointed to
a growing role for physics in biological
behavior: physics-based research can
create novel insights into the generating
mechanisms for behaviors that are common
to many species. This workshop will
highlight current directions in the
biophysics of organismal behavior,
bringing together researchers studying
systems ranging in scale from single cells
to neural circuits to large groups of
animals. The workshop will focus on how
physical principles and constraints can
define an organism’s strategies for
survival in a dynamic, noisy, and
resource-limited world. Specific topics to
be discussed will include the mechanics of
locomotion in complex environments,
algorithms and principles for learning and
adaptation, social and collective
dynamics, and the neural control of
behavior.
June 3
- June 24
Physical Principles
Governing the Organization
of Microbial Communities.
Organizers:
Kerwyn Casey Huang,
Stanford University
Rachel Dutton, University
of California San Diego
Alvaro Sanchez, Yale
University
Jeff Gore*, MIT
Nearly every environment
on earth is populated with a diverse
community of microorganisms bound together
by a web of interconnected metabolic
interactions. Microbial communities direct
global biogeochemical cycling,
bioremediation, and disease prevention.
Interest in the physical properties of
microbial communities is as old as
microbiology and imaging. In the 1600s,
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek exploited his
newfound powers of microscopy to discover
that microorganisms living on and in his
body showed a huge range in shape and
size. This first rudimentary evidence that
the human body harbors a microbiota also
established the first hint of complex
microbial ecosystems. Now, almost 400
years later, a renaissance of the study of
microbiota spatial organization, driven by
coincident revolutions in imaging and
sequencing technologies, is revealing
functional relationships between the
biogeography and organizational principles
of multispecies microbial communities, and
with the health of the hosts (including
humans) and the planet itself. The advent
of low-cost, high-throughput sequencing is
producing a revolution in the microbiota
field. Previously, assessing the
composition of a multispecies community
was a daunting task doomed to
incompleteness due to the challenges of
identifying conditions in which individual
species could be cultured. Now,
compositional profiling has become
routine, empowering experiments in which
the effect of perturbations to a community
can be rapidly and accurately assessed.
This newfound capability presents enormous
opportunities for physics and physicists
to advance this incredibly exciting field.
The goals of the program are to provide
unique opportunities to deconstruct
microbial communities and identify
governing principles that broadly inform
biology, physics, ecology, and
evolutionary biology.
June
17 - July 8
The Astrophysics of
Massive Black Hole Mergers:
From Galaxy Mergers to the
Gravitational Wave Regime
Organizers:
Julie Comerford*,
University of Colorado, Boulder
Crystal Martin,
University of California, Santa Barbara
George Privon, University
of Florida
David Sanders,
University of Hawaii
While it is now clear
from LIGO that stellar mass black hole
(BH) binaries exist and merge, the
existence of in-spiraling and merging
supermassive black holes (SMBHs) has yet
to be demonstrated. This workshop will
address the open astrophysical questions
regarding the precursors to SMBH binaries
in the gravitational wave regime.
Specifically, what are the rates at which
binary SMBHs enter an evolutionary phase
where their evolution is dominated by
gravitational wave emission and what are
the properties (masses, mass ratio,
orbits, etc.) of those binaries? Answering
these questions is critically important in
planning for low-frequency GW
observatories such as the Laser Space
Interferometer Antenna (LISA) and pulsar
timing arrays (PTAs). This workshop will
address the evolution of SMBH pairs from
the early stages of galaxy mergers,
through binary formation and hardening, up
to the gravitational wave regime. This
includes formation of the first massive
BHs, the frequency of galaxy mergers,
supermassive black hole growth during
galaxy mergers, and how the systems
dynamically evolve from galaxy merger to
BHs sinking into the galaxy center -
addressed from both
observational/experimental and theoretical
perspectives.
June
17 - July 15
Perfect Pixels.
Accurate Astrophysics. Correct
Cosmology.
Organizers:
Robert Lupton, Princeton
University
Rachel Mandelbaum,
Carnegie Mellon University
Hiranya Peiris, Oskar
Klein Centre for Cosmoparticle Physics
Stockholm
Andrew Pontzen*,
University College London
We are entering a
transformative period in observational
cosmology. Surveys starting in 2019
promise to solve key problems in cosmology
and astrophysics — but only if we
develop new approaches for handling the
volume and complexity of the data.
Extracting robust cosmological information
from these surveys is a major challenge
that will require development and
validation of analysis methods at each
step of the chain from raw pixels to
cosmology. A quantitative handle on
instrumental and pipeline systematics and
astrophysical contaminants will be
essential. This workshop will bring
together experts in a range of fields to
take a critical look at the full analysis
process, which starts with the hardware
and ends with accurate astrophysics and
correct cosmology.
June
24 - July 29
Topological Phases
and Excitations
of Quantum Matter
Organizers:
James Analytis,
University of California Berkeley
Fiona Burnell, University
of Minnesota
Xie Chen*, California
Institute of Technology
Liang Fu, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology
Michael Hermele,
University of Colorado Boulder
The last 10 years have
seen remarkable developments in our
understanding of topological phases of
matter. Topological quantum solids are
widespread, and a unified theoretical
framework of many of their unusual
electronic properties is emerging. Rapid
experimental progress towards engineering
non-Abelian topological excitations in
quantum devices may soon lay the
foundation for topological quantum
computation. Recent theoretical
developments in our understanding of
topological quantum matter have shed new
light on many unsolved problems connected
to field theory dualities, the fractional
quantum Hall effect,
superconductor-insulator transition,
quantum spin liquids, and heavy fermion
systems. New perspectives on the role of
topology in three-dimensional and in
out-of-equilibrium quantum systems are
also attracting considerable interest. The
aim of this workshop is to bring together
theorists and experimentalists from
different fields to address this broad
range of problems in the physics of
topological phases and excitations.
July
15 - August 5
Unveiling the
Physics of Protoplanet Formation:
Connecting Theory to Observations
Organizers:
Andrea Isella, Rice
University
Til Birnstiel, LMU Munich
Nienke Van Der Marel,
University of Hawaii
Ruobing Dong,
University of Arizona
Unprecedented high
angular resolution imagery of
circumstellar disks have revealed rings,
spirals, and crescents in the gas and dust
distribution around young (< 5 million
years) pre-main sequence stars. These
structures are the signposts of forming
planetary systems, and probe the mass,
orbit, and formation timescale of young
planets. Observations have also revealed
spatial variations of the dust particle
sizes and changes in the chemical
composition of the circumstellar gas.
These constrain the processes responsible
for the agglomeration of the large bodies
(asteroids and comets) that are required
to initiate the formation of rocky
planets. The recent results stimulate a
revision of planet formation models and
push for new theoretical studies aimed at
understanding the interactions between
disks and planets, as well as the physics
of solid particles in gaseous disks. The
goal of this workshop is to bring together
theorists and observers to collaborate on
unveiling the key physical processes
responsible for the formation of planets
and the evolution of solids in
protoplanetary disks.
July
29 - August 26
The Flavor of New
Physics in Collisions
Organizers:
Gudrun Hiller* Technical
University of Dortmund
Wolfgang Altmannshofer
University of Cincinnati
Yotam Soreq, MIT
Jure Zupan, University
of Cincinnati
The workshop will bring
together experts working on BSM physics
and on flavor physics, both theorists and
experimentalists, and provide a common
working and discussion arena between these
groups of experts. The workshop is
motivated, but not limited to the topics
that received an increased interest due to
recent experimental anomalies in b quark
transitions: flavor and new signatures at
high pT at ATLAS and CMS, the physics for
high luminosity LHCb, new theories of
flavor, implications for Higgs physics,
lepton universality violation and lepton
flavor violation, implications of
experimental results for models of
baryogenesis, the interplay between flavor
physics and solutions to the hierarchy
problem.
August
5 - August 26
SYK Models: From
Interacting Quantum Matter to Black
Holes
Organizers:
Leon Balents*,
University of California Santa Barbara
Marcel Franz,
University of British Columbia
Xiaoliang Qi, Stanford
University
Herman Verlinde,
Princeton University
In 1993 Sachdev and Ye
proposed a quantum mechanical model of a
spin liquid with local critical behavior.
In a series of lectures in the fall of
2015 Alexei Kitaev discussed a variant of
this model and presented compelling
arguments that its physics entails the
holographic description of a black hole.
The resulting Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK)
model is remarkably simple, yet it encodes
a great wealth of interesting physics. It
consists of N Majorana fermions
interacting among themselves via
“democratic” all-to-all random
interactions. Its solvability in the
large-N limit is quite unusual for a
strongly interacting system and makes the
SYK model a fertile ground for
explorations of the most fundamental
mysteries in modern physics. Over the past
two years, the SYK model became a subject
of a massive interdisciplinary effort
which uncovered its intriguing connections
with a multitude of phenomena that are of
great current interest. These include such
seemingly disparate areas as quantum chaos
and scrambling dynamics, thermalization
and ergodicity, aspects of holographic
duality and quantum gravity, holographic
quantum matter and strongly correlated
metals. Various generalizations and
extensions of the model have been
formulated and studied containing
supersymmetry, interesting quantum phase
transitions, extensions to higher
dimensions, as well as versions that do
not require randomness. Recently,
experimental realizations in atomic and
solid state systems have been proposed
which may lead to tabletop experiments
producing and probing artificial black
holes. The workshop will build on these
recent developments and bring together
researchers in condensed matter physics,
string theory, quantum gravity and quantum
information theory interested in the SYK
model and the related topics. We expect
the resulting proceedings to be truly
multidisciplinary and address some of the
most fundamental questions facing physics
today.
August
19 - September 16
Superconformal
Field Theories and Geometry
Organizers:
Sakura Schafer-Nameki,
University of Oxford
David R. Morrison*,
University of California Santa Barbara
Alessandro Tomasiello,
University of Milano-Bicocca
The goal of this summer
2018 workshop is to further develop the
connection between superconformal field
theories (SCFTs) and geometric
constructions in string theory, in
particular F-theory. Building on the
recent success in classifying
six-dimensional SCFTs within F-theory, the
goal of this workshop is to extend this to
SCFTs in lower dimensions. This will be
achieved by bringing together string
theorists and geometers, working on
F-theory, as well as experts on holography
and field theoretic aspects of SCFTs.
August
26 - September 16
Dynamics of the
Milky Way System in the Era of Gaia
Organizers:
Andrew Wetzel,
University of California, Davis
Sarah Loebman*,
University of California, Davis
Robyn Sanderson,
California Institute of Technology
Hans-Walter Rix, Max
Planck Institute for Astronomy
A wealth of
observational surveys are poised to
revolutionize our understanding of the
composition and formation of our Milky Way
galaxy. This workshop will focus on
observational analysis and theoretical
modeling of stellar dynamics of the entire
Milky Way system, from stars in the disk
and bulge to the satellite dwarf galaxies,
stellar streams, and stars throughout the
halo. The workshop will occur at a
watershed time for Galactic dynamics:
shortly after the second data release from
the Gaia satellite mission, which for the
first time can constrain the full
phase-space orbital distributions of stars
throughout the Galaxy. In parallel,
several ground-based surveys are measuring
high-resolution spectra for millions of
these stars, and the Hubble Space
Telescope is providing high-precision
proper motions of stars throughout the
halo. The groundbreaking scale and breadth
of this new view of the Milky Way
challenges the community to develop new
approaches for Galactic dynamics. This
workshop will bring together observers,
modelers, and simulators, to discuss (1)
how to analyze this wealth of
high-precision dynamics data and (2) how
to develop accurate, cosmologically
informed models to interpret them. The
overarching goals are galactic
archaeology, to understand the full 3D
formation history of the entire Milky Way
system, and near-field cosmology, to use
stellar dynamics to measure the
distribution and test the nature of dark
matter.
August
26 - September 16
Understanding the
Origin of the Baryon Asymmetry of the
Universe
Organizers:
Lorenzo Ubaldi, SISSA
Ann Nelson, University
of Washington
David Morrissey, TRIUMF
Seyda Ipek*, Fermilab
There is more matter
than antimatter in the Universe. Several
mechanisms of matter creation have been
proposed to explain this asymmetry, and
all of them appear to require new physics
beyond the Standard Model. Despite a broad
range of experimental searches, no
experimental evidence for such new physics
or the specific mechanism underlying the
asymmetry has been found. The aim of this
workshop is to bring together a diverse
range of theoretical and experimental
particle physicists to study new
developments in our understanding of the
baryon asymmetry. An emphasis will be
placed on ideas that can potentially be
tested in upcoming and planned
experimental searches.
