SPOTLIGHT TALK – 14/08/2024
The Warsaw Doctoral School in Natural and Biomedical Sciences and the Institute of Physics PAS cordially invites you to a SPOTLIGHT TALK.
The talk is given by Prof. Jarah Evslin (Institute of Modern Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences).
When and where?
14th August 2024, 10:30 am
at the IP PAS Auditorium, duration: 90 min + question time
Abstract
Solitons show up in many fields of physics from the monopoles and models of nucleons in strong interactions, to conducting plastics and novel memory storage devices. However, solitons are largely understood using classical physics. It is widely believed that quantum mechanics qualitatively changes some of their properties, for example causing some to quickly decay. We will describe a new method which allows for an efficient, reliable and complete treatment of solitons in quantum physics.
In the second lecture, we will describe some recent progress in constructing quantum kinks. We will describe how states, decay rates and scattering amplitudes may be found. Also we will introduce oscillons, which are thought to be the dominant degrees of freedom after violent events including some first order phase transitions and inflationary paradigms. We will describe how these new methods may be used to understand whether quantum corrections cause oscillons to decay so quickly that they are phenomenologically irrelevant.
This event is supported by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange, grant no. BPI/STE/2021/1/00034/U/00001.
About the speaker
Jarah Evslin got his Bachelor of Science degree in Math and Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from Caltech in 1997, he got his PhD degree in Physics from the University of California Berkeley in 2001. After that he did his postdocs in Pisa, Trieste and Brussels. Later he became an adjunct professor at the University of Pisa.
Since 2014, he is a professor at the Institute of Modern Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is the coordinator of the International Science Development Team for Fundamental Physics at the Thirty Meter Telescope. He published 112 papers in refereed journals, plus 1 book chapter and 7 proceedings. In the past, he has studied dark matter, dark energy, string theory, black holes and neutrino physics. For the past 5 years, his research has worked towards understanding why gluons and quarks are always confined in nuclei.