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News from ICTP Spring–Summer 2018 14 5 News from ICTP Spring–Summer 2018 14 5 News from ICTP:145 Contents The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical 04 Kip Thorne Delivers ICTP Physics (ICTP) is governed by the United Nations Colloquium Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and Italy. It is 06 2018 ICTP/ICO Prize Winner Urbasi a UNESCO category 1 institute. Sinha Promoting Quantum Science and Technology in India News from ICTP is a bi-annual publication designed to keep scientists and staf informed on past and future activities at 08 A Conversation with Alan Guth ICTP and initiatives in their home countries. The text may be reproduced freely with due credit to the source. 09 2017 Dirac Medal Ceremony Honours Three Quantum Science ICTP on the web: www.ictp.it Pioneers Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, iTunes U, Instagram 10 Research Highlights 12 ICTP News Briefs 16 Alumni News 18 In Memoriam ICTP Public Information Office Cover photo: Students from Palestine and Strada Costiera, 11 Morocco visited ICTP's SciFabLab in April to I-34151 Trieste learn how to use and code for 3D printers and Italy other tools, with the goal of opening fabrication laboratories at their home institutes. The students [email protected] were here thanks to a collaboration between ICTP, the Sunshine4Palestine non-governmental ISSN 2222-6923 organization, and the Young Minds section of the European Physical Society. 4 Features Kip Thorne Delivers ICTP Colloquium From winning a physics Nobel prize to developing the talk’s abstract outlines. Thorne described what these concept for a Hollywood blockbuster film, theoretical have begun to teach us, and ofered a vision for the physicist Kip Thorne’s expertise and enthusiasm future of geometrodynamics. for astrophysics has captured the minds and imaginations of millions. His research in gravitational Professor Thorne is currently the Feynman Professor waves contributed to their detection by the Laser of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus at the California Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Institute of Technology (Caltech). He was cofounder in 2015, and he lent his scientific credentials as a (with Rainer Weiss and Ronald Drever) of the LIGO consultant for the 2014 film Interstellar. project. LIGO - in the hands of a younger generation of physicists - made the breakthrough discovery of On Thursday 24 May, Professor Thorne brought gravitational waves arriving at Earth from the distant his brand of science excitement to ICTP, where he universe on 14 September 2015. For his contributions delivered a colloquium on Geometrodynamics: The to LIGO and to gravitational wave research, Thorne Nonlinear Dynamics of Curved Spacetime. His talk shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics with Rainer centered on a challenge posed 50 years ago by Weiss and Barry Barish. In 2009, Thorne stepped his doctoral supervisor, John Wheeler, to explore down from his Caltech professorship to ramp up a geometrodynamics--understanding gravitation new career at the interface between art and science, through fluctuations in geometry--by asking, how including the movie Interstellar (which sprang from does the curvature of spacetime behave when roiled a treatment he co-authored, and for which he was in a storm; like a storm at sea with crashing waves? executive producer and science advisor). “We tried to explore this and failed. Success eluded us until two new tools became available: computer A video interview with Thorne is available on ICTP’s simulations, and gravitational wave observations,” the YouTube page. 5 Features 2018 ICTP/ICO Prize Winner Urbasi Sinha Promoting Quantum Science and Technology in India In India, she created and leads the country’s first Back in India, Sinha’s lab is pursuing several research laboratory dedicated to research in quantum lines, providing valuable hands-on experience to optics, directing ground-breaking research in the many students who are keen to work with a quantum information and computing. Her research scientist of Sinha’s international stature. “Quantum achievements, combined with her active promotion information is a very new area in India, especially of optics research to the general public, have earned experimental, and ours is one of the first modern labs Urbasi Sinha the 2018 International Commission for to be dedicated to this field,” she said. One activity at Optics(ICO)/ICTP Gallieno Denardo Award. the lab is investigating a higher dimensional system--a unit of quantum information--called a qutrit. “This is an The optics prize is awarded annually to researchers alternative approach to trying to increase the number younger than 40 years of age from a developing of qubits in a quantum computer, which is what most country who have made significant contributions to the people are trying to do,” Sinha explained, referring to field of optics or photonics. Sinha was presented with technology giants like IBM and Intel who are in a race the award at a ceremony held at ICTP on 13 February, to produce quantum computers with 50 qubits. during the Centre’s annual Winter College on Optics. Other research lines include quantum entanglement At her Quantum Optics Laboratory based at the Raman and quantum key distribution. The latter, explained Research Institute in Bengaluru, India, Sinha has been Sinha, will play an important role in information security investigating new frontiers in the world of quantum once quantum computers become a reality. “The optics. Her experience in the field prepared her well for problem is that a quantum computer is going to be the pioneering role she now finds herself in. Educated able to run an algorithm which can break the classical at Cambridge, she spent several years at Canada’s key distribution, called Shor’s Algorithm, that is used Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC), where she was for encryption and decryption. So, we need a quantum encouraged by IQC Founder and Director Raymond answer to the question.” Laflamme (a student of Stephen Hawking) to perform experiments in IQC’s quantum optics lab. “I wanted to learn quantum optics by experimentation, and this was one of the best environments to do that in,” Sinha explained. One of her first experiments there was to test a key concept of quantum mechanics known as Born’s rule (a rule that predicts the probabilities for occurrence of events) but had, until then, never been explicitly tested. The results of that experiment, summarized in an article with Sinha as lead author and Laflamme and others as co-authors, proved the validity of Born’s Rule and received broad media coverage after it was published in Science magazine in 2010 (10.1126/science.1190545). 6 Features 7 Features A Conversation with Alan Guth Guth has continued to elaborate the theory of inflation and delve into other topics as a professor at MIT. His three Salam Distinguished Lectures covered the possibility of our universe being part of a multiverse, the implications of eternal inflation of the universe, and the possible origin of the arrow of time. Work by Guth and other physicists on eternal inflation has led to the idea of a multiverse, where space is full of patches, with physical properties difering in each. “In most versions of inflation theory, inflation is eternal into the future— it stops in places, but always continues in other places. Where inflation stops, universes form, which we call pocket universes,” Guth explains. Increasing amounts of data are helping refine theories of inflation, but Guth The Salam Distinguished Lecture Series is an annual has said that it’s difcult to have a theory of inflation that tradition at ICTP, providing an opportunity for renowned does not lead to the existence of a multiverse. scientists to showcase recent advances in their fields. The 2018 series featured cosmologist Alan Guth, a Guth is still investigating the early universe in a variety professor at MIT and an ICTP Dirac Medallist. Guth of other ways. One of his lines of research is an explored fundamental questions about the beginnings exploration of primordial black holes, “which are black and structure of the universe in his ICTP talks. holes that could have formed immediately after the Big Bang,” Guth says. “We’re looking at a scenario where In 1979, Guth was a post-doctoral researcher the black holes form directly as a consequence of the focusing not on cosmology but on particle physics. density perturbations created by inflation.” Not much is He was in his eighth year as a postdoc, struggling known about how black holes merge and evolve over to find a job, when he heard two lectures by visiting time, but eventually, theories about primordial black cosmologists, one of which introduced him to the holes could provide predictions about distributions flatness problem. Our universe has no perceptible and masses of observable black holes today, providing space-time curvature, hence it is ‘flat’, a situation that more clues to the development of the universe. seemingly requires incredibly precise initial conditions. This leaves cosmologists to wonder how these initial “The amazing thing about the current state of conditions came to be so precisely fine-tuned. Guth cosmology is both how much we know and how was fascinated, even though it had little to do with his much we don’t know,” Guth says. “We know how previous work. It seemed suspicious that such precise to build inflationary models that make spectacular initial conditions would be just a coincidence. predictions for all the properties we can measure, like the measurements of the cosmic background radiation. Guth was soon drawn into cosmology and went on to Those measurements have grown more and more develop the theory of inflation. This theory describes an precise and still continue to fit perfectly with what exponential expansion-explosion of space from about simple models of inflation predict— I find that amazing.” 10-36 seconds to 10-33 seconds after the Big Bang, which Guth adds, “But at the same time, there are very accounts for the density distribution of the universe, the fundamental things that we don’t understand, so there large-scale structure of the universe.
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