Monday 28 and Tuesday 29 January 2008
Organised by Professor Tom Kibble FRS and Professor George Pickett FRS
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Professor James Anglin, Speaker
Date and place of birth: 17.04.1967, Oromocto, New Brunswick, Kanada
Address: TU Kaiserslautern Erwin-Schrödingerstr. 46, 67663 Kaiserslautern
Employment
1984 - 1988 Studium an Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario, Kanada
Apr 1988 Bachelor of Science with Honours, Class I, Theoretical Physics
1988 - 1994 Studium an McGill University, Montreal, Québec, Kanada
Feb 1991 Master of Science, Physics, Thema: "Wormholes and Supersymmetry"
Feb 1994 Ph.D. in Physics (Dean's Honour List), Theme: "Influence Functionals and Thermal Effects in Quantum Field Theory"
1994 - 1997 Postdoctoral-Stelle am Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA
1997 - 1999 Postdoctoral-Stelle am Universität Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Österreich
1999 - 2000 Visiting Scientist, Institute for Theoretical Atomic and Molecular Physics, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
2000 - 2004 Research Associate, MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
2004 Adjunct Professor, Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA
2005 Adjunct Professor, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Sep 2005 Ernennung zum Universitätsprofessor (W3) für theoretische Physik an der Universität Kaiserslautern
Scientific Award/Prize/Nomination
1994 - 1996 Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Post-Doctoral Fellowship
Selected publications
D.J. Thouless and J.R. Anglin, "Vortex mass in a superfluid at low frequencies"; Physical Review Letters 99, 105301 (2007).
D.A. Petrosyan, B. Schmidt, J.R. Anglin and M. Fleischhauer, "Quantum liquid of repulsively bound pairs of particles in a lattice"; Physical Review A 76, 033606 (2007).
J.R. Anglin and W. Ketterle, "Bose-Einstein condensation of atomic gases"; Nature 416, 211 (2002).
J.R. Anglin, "Local vortex generation and the surface mode spectrum of large condensates"; Physical Review Letters 87, 240401 (2001).
L.J. Garay, J.R. Anglin, J.I. Cirac and P. Zoller, "Sonic analog of gravitational black holes in Bose-Einstein condensates"; Physical Review Letters 85, 4643 (2000).
Professor Yuri Bunkov, Speaker
I was born 29 August 1950 in Stavropol, Russia, into a family of geologists. In 1968 I emerged from a Moscow special school for Physics and Mathematics, and gained first place in the Moscow Physics Olympiad. I then entered Moscow Physical and Technical Institute, under the chair of Piotr Kapitza. As a student I observed and explained the "parametric echo", now named the Bunkov echo. That is the echo signal seen in magnetically ordered materials after a single resonance and a single parametric pulse. In 1974 I joined the Kapitza Institute for Physical Problems, completing my PhD in 1979 under academician Borovik-Romanov. In 1982 our group succeeded in cooling 3He into the superfluid state and in the following year we discovered spin superfluidity, the superflow of 3He magnetization with no mass current. We observed the formation of a magnetically coherent state which is now considered a Bose-Einstein condensation of magnons. We also observed the magnetic Josephson effect, critical spin supercurrent, phase slippage and others spin coherent phenomena. In 1985 I got the professor degree.
During the tens of years when I participated in the Soviet-Finnish project ROTA, we discovered a world of many different types of vortices in 3He. I have also visited Lancaster University many times where I participated in experiments on NMR at the world-record low temperatures for 3He.
From 1995 I have worked in the CRTBT (now Institute Neel), CNRS, Grenoble, as a CNRS Director of Research. We have been able to cool 3He to 100K and in 1996 found an energy deficit after a 3He neutron capture reaction at these low temperatures. The deficit appeared to arise from vortex creation via the Kibble-Zurek cosmological mechanism, in analogy with cosmic-string creation in the early Universe.
Currently I am leading the project ULTIMA (Ultra Low Temperature Instrumentation for Measurements in Astrophysics). In this project we are developing a dark-matter detector based on overcooled superfluid 3He.
In 1968 I gained first place in the Moscow Physics Olympiad. In 1993 I won the State prize of the Russian Federation for discovery of magnetic superfluidity and in 2001 I received an honorary doctorate from the Pavel Safarik University, Koaice, Slovakia.
Research interests: Quantum fluids and solids, Superfluid 3He NMR, Cosmology, Ultra-low temperatures techniques and their application to Cosmology and the search for dark matter.
Professor Anne Christine Davis, Speaker
My reseach is at the interface of particle physics and cosmology and I am interested in the links between extended objects which arise here (mainly cosmic strings and branes) and those that are found in condensed matter systems.
I have been in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Cambridge University since 1983 in successive positions of Advanced Fellow, College Teaching Officer, Reader and now Professor. I have been a Professor since 2002 and was first women to be elected to a Chair in Mathematics at Cambridge University. I have been Deputy Head of my department and Chair of the Faculty Board of Mathematics. Prior to coming to Cambridge I had postdoc positions at CERN, Princeton, Imperial College and Durham having obtained a PhD in particle phenomenology at Bristol University. Of my postdoc positions the one that had the most influence on me was probably Imperial College where I broadened
my horizons. Over the years I have had over twenty research students and love working with students and postdocs.
Dr Richard P Haley, Speaker
I am an experimental condensed matter physicist working on the fundamental properties of superfluid helium-3 at the lowest achievable temperatures of around a hundred microdegrees above absolute zero. After completing my PhD in Manchester, I worked first as a postdoc at the University of Florida, followed by a second postdoc position at Lancaster University, where I now hold a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. Serendipitously, the superfluid helium-3 condensate, with its complex properties of combined mass- spin- and orbital-superfluidity, has an internal structure which closely mirrors that of space-time itself, making the helium-3 condensate an ideal analogue system for the simulation of cosmological phenomena. One of our exciting recent discoveries is that the superfluid can be used to simulate aspects of the braneworld scenario of the early Universe.
Professor Tom Kibble FRS, Organiser
Tom Kibble was educated in Edinburgh. After a year at Caltech, he has been at Imperial College London since 1959. He became a professor in 1970, and an FRS in 1980. He was Head of the Physics Department from 1983 to 1991, and is currently a Senior Research Fellow and Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics. He was appointed a CBE in 1998. His primary research interests are in quantum field theory and cosmology, especially spontaneous symmetry breaking and defect formation.
Professor Matti Krusius, Speaker
Matti Krusius is a low temperature physicist who investigates the properties of matter at very low temperatures. These materials show quantum behaviour on large scale and in¬clude the superfluids and superconductors. He graduated from the Helsinki University of Technology in 1972. He has held positions as professor of physics at the University of Turku for five years and for the last 25 years at the Low Temperature Laboratory in the Helsinki University of Technology. He has also been employed as senior scientist for four years at the University of California in San Diego and in the Los Ala¬mos National Laboratory in New Mexico. New research problems, such as the superfluid quantized vortex as a model for the cosmic string, make his work an exciting experience together with a team of young and brilliant students in his research group.
Dr Ulf Leonhardt, Speaker
Ulf Leonhardt was born in Schlema, in former East Germany, on October 9th 1965. He studied at Friedrich-Schiller University Jena, Germany, at Moscow State University, Russia, and at Humboldt University Berlin, Germany. He received the Diploma in Physics from Friedrich-Schiller University in 1990 and the PhD in Theoretical Physics from Humboldt University in 1993.
Ulf Leonhardt was a research associate at the Max Planck Research Group Nonclassical Radiation in Berlin 1994-1995, a visiting scholar at the Oregon Center for Optics in Eugene, Oregon, 1995-1996, a Habilitation Fellow of the German Research Council at the University of Ulm, Germany, 1996-1998, and a Feodor-Lynen and Garan-Gustafsson Fellow at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, 1998-2000. Since April 2000 he is the Chair in Theoretical Physics at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.
Ulf Leonhardt enjoys imaginative research that connects the practical aspects of physics with abstract ideas, thoughts and stories. He loves to find and use unusual and often unused connections across several areas of physics. In particular, he is interested in connections between quantum optics and general relativity. In addition to his theoretical work, he is also running an experiment where the tools of ultrafast photonics are used to make analogues of the event horizon in the laboratory.
Ulf Leonhardt is the first from former East Germany to win the Otto Hahn Award of the Max Planck Society. For his PhD thesis he received the Tiburtius Prize of the Senate of Berlin. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics. In 2006 he shared the Scientific American 50 Award for his work on invisibility devices.
Professor Ray Rivers, Speaker
Since his PhD with Abdus Salam at the International Centre in Trieste, and some time with Prof. Nambu's group at the Fermi Institute, Chicago, Ray Rivers has spent his professional life at Imperial College London, where he is Professor of Theoretical Physics. He is, primarily, a particle physicist and quantum field theorist with particular interest in the extreme conditions found in the early universe. In the last several years he has been active in developing comparisons and analogies between the equations controlling the early universe and those of rapidly changing condensed matter systems, specifically those of condensates and superconductors. He is currently visiting Professor at Paris VII. Further information is available on his web site http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/people/r.rivers
Professor George Pickett FRS, Organiser
After a DPhil in low temperature physics at the Clarendon, I spent five years in Scandinavia in postdoc positions in Helsinki and Uppsala. I then returned to the new low temperature group at Lancaster University where I have remained ever since. The Lancaster ULT Group has focussed for many years on the properties of quantum fluids in the zero-temperature limit, including the many cosmological analogue behaviours. We build our own low temperature equipment including all our dilution refrigerators and nuclear cooling stages and hold, and have held, a number of World low-temperature records. We also have a long record of collaboration with groups in Eastern Europe. In that context I have served as Chairman of the Council of Scientists of INTAS (2002-4) which distributes EU research money for collaboration with the states of the former Soviet Union. I am also a member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences and of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Professor Joseph Polchinski, Speaker
Joe Polchinski received his B.S. in Physics from Caltech in 1975, and his Ph.D. in Physics from U.C. Berkeley in 1980. After postdocs at SLAC and Harvard, he joined the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin from 1984 to 1992. Since 1992 he has been a Permanent Member at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and Professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Polchinski's interests span quantum field theory and string theory. His early work included supersymmetric phenomenology and a modern reformulation of renormalization theory. In string theory, he discovered the existence of a certain form of extended structure, the D-brane, which has been important in the nonperturbative formulation of the theory. His current interests include the phenomenology of cosmic strings and various aspects of the duality between gauge theory and gravity.
Polchinski has also written a widely-used two-volume textbook on string theory. His awards and honors include an A. P. Sloan Fellowship (1985), fellowship in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2002) and membership in the National Academy of Sciences (2005).
Dr Emil Polturak, Speaker
Emil Polturak studied Physics and Mathematics at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, obtaining his BSc in 1972. Spending a significant part of his time playing in a rock band did not help him in achieving high grades, but they were good enough to get into graduate school. During this period, his interest turned to Low temperature Physics, following a course on "Superfluidity" taught by Felix Bloch, then a visiting professor at the Hebrew University. He obtained his PhD from Tel Aviv University, following 3 years of experimental research on the "Specific Heat of 3He-4He mixtures", under the supervision of Ralph Rosenbaum.
Starting in 1979, Emil spent an exciting 2 years in the Low Temperature Laboratory at Cornell University, working on the properties of superfluid 3He at ultra low temperatures, as a postdoctoral associate with David Lee and Robert Richardson (both Nobel prize laureates on the discovery of superfluid 3He). In 1981, Emil returned to Israel and joined the Technion Physics Department as an Alon fellow. Following the discovery of High Temperature Superconductivity in 1986, he branched into this new area as well, while continuing to pursue the physics of Liquid and Solid Helium.
In 1996, Emil was appointed Head of the Technion Crown Center on Superconductivity. He served as Department Chairman between 2002 and 2004. As of now, 20 students have completed their theses under his supervision.
Dr Mairi Sakellariadou, Speaker
The research of Dr M Sakellariadou is focused on the physics of the early universe; a field which lies in the interface between cosmology and particle physics.
The main topics of her research are topological defects, in particular cosmic strings, string theory motivated inflationary models, cosmological models based in supersymmetric grand unified theories, brane world cosmology, string gas smology, loop quantum cosmology and modified gravity.
Dr Sakellariadou was born in Athens (Hellas) and she received her education at the University of Athens, University of Cambidge and Tufts University, where she got her Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof A Vlenkin; her thesis was in cosmic string dynamics.
Dr Sakellariadou is Reader in the Department of Physics, King's College London from 2005. She is Scientific Associate at the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris from 2000. In 2000 she was elected Associate Professor at the Universty of Athens. Previously, she had various post-doctoral positions in Geneva, CERN, Zuerich, Paris 6, Tours and Brussels. For several years she was Editor in Chief of Helvetica Physica Acta.
Dr William Unruh FRS, Speaker
William Unruh completed his B.Sc. in Physics at the University of Manitoba in 1966, before moving to Princeton University to continue his studies. He graduated with his Ph.D. in 1971, after which he worked for about a year as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Birbeck College in London, England. In January 1973, he took a position at the University of California, Berkeley-Miller Institute for Basic Research, and in 1974 he became an Assistant Professor at McMaster University. In 1976, he moved to the University of British Columbia, where he became a full Professor in 1982. In 1985, Dr. Unruh became the first Director of CIAR's Cosmology and Gravity Program, a position he held until 1996. Dr Unruh has received numerous awards for his scholarship including the Rutherford Medal from the Royal Society of Canada in 1982; the Herzberg Medal from the Canadian Association of Physicists in 1983, and a Steacie Prize from the National Research Council in 1984. More recently, he was awarded the B.C. Science and Engineering Gold Medal in Natural Sciences and U.B.C. Killam Research Prize in 1990, a Canada Council Killam Prize in the Natural Sciences and a CAP Medal of Achievement in 1995, and finally, a CAP/CRM Prize in Mathematical Physics. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Fellow of the American Physical Society and in 2001 was elected as Fellow of the Royal Society of London.
Dr Ralf Schützhold, Speaker
Education
1990-1992 Abitur examination, Chemnitz University of Technology
1992-1993 Civil service
1993-1998 Diploma (with distinction) in physics, Dresden University of Technology
Diploma thesis "Vakuumzerfall aufgrund dynamischer Storungen",
("Vacuum decay due to dynamical disturbances"), supervisor: Prof. Dr. G. Soff
1998-2001 PhD in physics (summa cum laude), Dresden University of Technology
PhD thesis "Aspects of Quantum Radiation", supervisor: Prof. Dr. G. Soff
2007 Habilitation "Amplified quantum fluctuations in Bose-Einstein condensates",
Mentor: Prof. Dr. Jan-Michael Rost,
Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems Dresden
Employment
1995-1998 Teaching assistant at Institute for Analysis (Mathematics Department) and at the Institute for Theoretical Physics (Dresden University of Technology)
1998-2001 Research associate (as PhD student) at the Institute for Theoretical Physics
2001-2003 Post-Doc at the Department of Physics & Astronomy, UBC Vancouver
since 2003 Emmy Noether research group leader at the Dresden University of Technology (comparable to Marie Curie Excellence Grants from the EU or the EURYI Award from the ESF)
2007 offer of temorary W3 Professor position at the University of Heidelberg (Heidelberg Graduate School of Fundamental Physics)
Professor Tanmay Vachaspati, Speaker
Tanmay Vachaspati is a National Science Talent scholar (India) and a B.Sc. gold medalist from Allahabad University. In 1985 he received a Ph.D. from Tufts University, then went on to postdoctoral and faculty positions at Bartol Research Institute (University of Delaware), Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (University of Cambridge), and Tufts University. He was the Rosenbaum Fellow for the Topological Defects Programme at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge in 1994. In 2002 he was nominated Fellow of the American Physical Society. He has held visiting positions at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Universities of Paris (VII and XI) and adjunct professorship at Harish Chandra Research Institute, and is a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Currently he is Professor in the faculty of the Physics Department at Case Western Reserve University. His research has focused on all aspects and applications of topological defects, especially in particle physics and cosmology. His research interests also include the beginnings of our universe, black holes, primordial magnetic fields, and laboratory analogs of quantum gravitational phenomena.
Professor William Vinen FRS, Speaker
I started my career in Cambridge, and held Fellowships at Clare and Pembroke Colleges. In 1963 I was appointed Professor of Physics in the University of Birmingham, and I was appointed to the Poynting Chair in 1973. I served as Head of the Physics Department in Birmingham from 1973 to 1981. I retired in 1997, but I have remained active in my research, most of which has been concerned with superfluidity, superconductivity, fluid dynamics and the properties of two-dimensional systems. Elected FRS in 1973.
Professor Grigory E.Volovik, Speaker
Date and place of birth:
September 7, 1946, Moscow, USSR.
1970: Graduated from Physical Technical Institute, Moscow, USSR.
1973: PhD in Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics,
Thesis: "Dynamics of particle strongly interacting with Bose system".
1981: Senior Doctor thesis in Landau Institute "Topology of the defects
in condensed matter".
from 1973 to present time: Staff Member of Landau Institute
from 1993 to present time:
sharing the position in Landau Institute and visiting professor in the Low Temperature Laboratory of Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
from 2001: Foreign member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters
from 2007: member of Leopoldina Academy, Germany
2003--2006: Chair of the European Science Foundation Programme ``Cosmology in the Laboratory''.
1992: Landau Prize of Russian Academy of Sciences for series of works "Topology, defects, superfluidity".
2004: Simon Prize for research on the effects of symmetry in superfluids and superconductors and the extension of these ideas to quantum field theory, cosmology, quantum gravity and particle physics.
from 1991: Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the journal "JETP Letters".
2006-2008, Divisional Associate Editor of journal Phys. Rev. Lett.
300 published papers
Monographs:
"Exotic properties of superfluid 3He", World Scientific, Singapore, 1992.
"Universe in a Helium Droplet", Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2003.
Dr Wojciech H. Zurek, Speaker
W. H. Zurek is a Laboratory Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Zurek's recent work has been on the transition from quantum to classical (his subject of interest for the past 25 years), with a special focus on decoherence. He is also interested in the physics of information and in the dynamics of phase transitions. In addition, Zurek has made contributions to theoretical astrophysics.
Zurek earned his M.Sc. in Krakow, in his native Poland, and his Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin, where he stayed until 1981 as a postdoctoral fellow of John Archibald Wheeler, whose influence is reflected in Zurek's scientific agenda. In 1981, Zurek joined the group of Kip Thorne at Caltech as a Tolman Fellow and arrived at Los Alamos in 1984 as an Oppenheimer Fellow. He became a staff member in the Theoretical Astrophysics group several years later and its leader after Stirling Colgate retired in 1990. In 1996, he was elected Laboratory Fellow, and works at the Theory Division in Los Alamos. In 2004 and 2005 academic year Zurek was a Phi Beta Kappa lecturer, and in 2005 he won the Alexander von Humboldt Prize.
Wojciech Zurek demonstrated (with William Wootters; similar result was obtained independently by Dennis Dieks) that an unknown quantum state cannot be copied: No-cloning theorem reveals nature of quantum states, shows why entanglement cannot be used for superluminal communication, and is essential in quantum cryptography. It also illustrates the quantum fuzziness of the border between existence and information that was so clearly delineated in classical physics.
Zurek developed theory of decoherence to understand quantum origins of the classical states and classical behavior: Environment-induced superselection shows how, when quantum systems are even weakly coupled to their environments, symptoms of classicality arise as a consequence of "accidental measurements" of the monitoring of the system by its environment. Regardless of its fundamental implications, theory of decoherence is of practical importance, e.g. for quantum information processing. Further advances made by Zurek, his colleagues, and others, show that decoherence is related to the dynamical arrow of time, and illustrate how the environment (regarded originally as a reservoir where excess quantum information can be lost) serves as a communication channel that delivers most of the information to the observer. They also show that quantum entanglement with the environment can be used to justify Born's rule.
Zurek proposed theory of the dynamics of second-order phase transitions that extends cosmological ideas of Tom Kibble allowing one to predict sizes of regions that choose same broken-symmetry state, which yields density of topological defects left by phase transitions in laboratory experiments.