Previous Bulletins

Fabien Lacasa, a recent PhD from the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale, IAS, at Orsay, arrived at ICTP-SAIFR in December. Fabien is a member of the Planck Satellite Collaboration and will contribute to the Dark Energy Survey project, a photometric survey aimed at mapping 300 million galaxies in the next 5 years with the goal of pinning down the best theory that describes our Universe.

To help disseminate ICTP-SAIFR activities, approximately 60 distinguished theoretical physicists distributed throughout South America have agreed to be ICTP-SAIFR Associate Members and act as contact representatives in their respective countries.

ICTP-SAIFR vice-director Rogerio Rosenfeld has published in November a book intended for the general public in Brazil. With the title "O Cerne da Matéria: A aventura científica que levou à descoberta do bóson de Higgs" ("The Heart of the Matter: the scientific adventure that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson"), it describes the evolution of particle accelerators that culminated with the LHC and the recent discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.

David Gross, director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara from 1997 to 2012 and recipient of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the strong interactions, visited ICTP-SAIFR on November 12. He led an informal discussion with students and researchers involving a question-answer session on all aspects of science, and his visit was sponsored by the Nobel Week Dialogue and the Nobel Prize Inspiration Initiative (NPII).

The School on Fundamental Astrophysics was held at ICTP-SAIFR from October 7-18. Organized by Daniel Gomez (UBA, Argentina), Elisabete M. de Gouveia Dal Pino (USP, Brasil), Alejandro Raga (UNAM, Mexico) and Matias Zaldarriaga (IAS Princeton, USA), its goal was to provide a comprehensive view of the fundamental problems in Theoretical Astrophysics, along with an up-to-date overview on current trends in Observational Astrophysics.

With the participation of the leading experts in the field, the Workshop on Higher-Spin and Higher-Curvature Gravity took place at ICTP-SAIFR from November 4-7. Organized by Eric Bergshoeff (Groningen), Gastón Giribet (Buenos Aires), Marc Henneux (Brussels) and Jorge Zanelli (Valdívia), 54 researchers from 18 different countries heard review talks and specialized seminars on higher-spin generalizations of general relativity.

Recent advances in the field of nonlinear optical systems in the nanoscale were the subject of the School on Nonlinear Optics and Nanophotonics, which took place from November 25 - December 6. Organized by Cristina Masoller (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain), Hilda A. Cerdeira (ICTP-SAIFR, Brazil), and Yuri Kivshar (Australia National University), the lectures discussed the topics of photonic cyrstals and photonic lattices, nonlinear optics at the nanoscale, active optical media and laser dynamics, nonlinear effects in optical communication systems, metamaterials, and the complex dynamics of quantum optical systems.

Alexei Rosly (ITEP, Moscow) and Andrei Mikhailov (IFT-UNESP) taught a minicourse on Twistor Theory from October 8- November 15. After giving a general introduction to complex geometry, the lecturers discussed the twistor description of massless fields of arbitrary spin and its application to constructing classical solutions of self-dual Yang-Mills theory and N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory.

Michele Redi (INFN, Firenze) taught a minicourse on Composite Higgs in the LHC Era from October 23-25. Michele talked about recent advances in describing the Higgs boson as a pseudo Nambu-Goldstone boson in an Effective Theory framework and discussed some phenomenological applications.

The Program on Amplitudes and Correlation Functions, led by Pedro Vieira (Perimeter Institute, Canada), took place from October 20 through December 20. With the participation of 12 external researchers in addition to several local researchers, the program included a minicourse on the relation of Wilson Loops and Scattering Amplitudes with lectures by Pedro Vieira, Benjamin Basso (Perimeter) and Amit Server (Perimeter and IAS Princeton).

Filipe Abdalla minicourse on data analysis in cosmology (January 27 - 31)

III Southern-Summer School on Mathematical Biology with distinguished lecturer Simon Levin
(February 3 - 14)

2014 Meeting of Steering Committee and Scientific Council (February 17 - 19)

Aharony-Entin program on nanophysics and spintronics (Workshop from March 13 - 14)

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