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ICTP-SAIFR Scientific Bulletin #16, October – December 2016


Program on Particle Physics

From October 3 – November 11, ICTP-SAIFR/IFT-UNESP professors Eduardo Pontón and Rogerio Rosenfeld organized a 6-week program on particle physics involving 10 visiting researchers from the USA, South America and Europe who presented seminars and discussed new results from the Large Hadron Collider accelerator at CERN.



Papos de Física - October

Papos de Fisica is a monthly outreach program of ICTP-SAIFR introducing current topics in theoretical physics to the general public in an informal setting. On October 6, Ricardo Matheus (IFT-UNESP) talked about the history and the future of elementary particles in the seminar entitled “The atom of the atom”.



Entrepreneurship Workshop for Scientists and Engineers

The Entrepreneurship Workshop for Scientists and Engineers was held at ICTP-SAIFR from October 17 - 21 and organized by N. Berkovits (ICTP-SAIFR/IFT-UNESP), R. Marques (IQ-UNESP), S. Raghu (ET-CUBE), L. Clark (IOP, London), V. Bolzani (AUIN-UNESP) and R. Costoya (AUIN-UNESP). The workshop lecturers taught students entrepreneurial skills that could be used to commercialise their scientific ideas and inventions.



III Dark Matter Day in São Paulo

On October 25, ICTP-SAIFR held the third Dark Matter Day meeting in São Paulo. Organized by Fabio Iocco (ICTP-SAIFR) and Manuela Vecchi (USP São Carlos), this activity brought together South American researchers in the field of Dark Matter with the purpose of developing new projects within Brazil and South America in this area.



International agreement with Mainz ITP

On November 1, an agreement was signed with the Mainz Institute for Theoretical Physics at Johannes Gutenberg Univ. in Germany on the joint financing of visitors and workshops. From left to right are Nathan Berkovits (director of ICTP-SAIFR), Georg Krausch (president of JGU-Mainz) and Matthias Neubert (director of Mainz ITP).



ICTP-SAIFR 5th Anniversary Symposium: Advancement of Science in South America

On November 6-8, 2016, ICTP-SAIFR celebrated its 5th anniversary with a symposium of public talks, research seminars and roundtable discussions with the participation of its Steering Committee and Scientific Council, its 60 Associated Members from South America, and several invited distinguished speakers and panelists.



ICTP-SAIFR Symposium Public Lectures

On November 6, three renowned physicists presented seminars to the general public on "100 years of General Relativity: The enduring legacy of Albert Einstein" (David Gross - 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics), "Detecting gravitational waves from black holes" (Gabriela González - spokesperson for LIGO gravitational wave collaboration) and "Explorando as sutilezas do mundo quântico: De Einstein e Schrödinger à Informação Quântica" (Luiz Davidovich - president of Brazilian Academy of Science).



ICTP-SAIFR Symposium Parallel Research Seminars

At the same time as the public lectures on November 6, 40 of the 60 distinguished ICTP-SAIFR associate members coming from all over South America presented 5 parallel sessions of research seminars in the subareas of nonlinear systems, condensed matter, cosmology, particle physics, and field theory



International agreement with Perimeter Institute

On November 8 during the Symposium, a ceremony was held celebrating the collaboration with Perimeter Institute (Waterloo, Canada) involving joint faculty member Pedro Vieira and joint research and outreach activities. In addition to Canadian Ambassador Rick Savone, Perimeter Director Neil Turok and COO Michael Duschenes, the ceremony included the top high-school students from a recent ICTP-SAIFR minicourse.



Special seminar of Juan Maldacena

On November 8, Juan Maldacena (IAS, Princeton) presented the seminar “Comments on the SYK model and AdS2”. Prof. Maldacena´s work focuses on quantum gravity and string theory and he has been awarded various prizes including the Dirac Medal in 2008 and the Fundamental Physics Prize in 2012.



Workshop on New Phenomena in Mesoscopic Systems

The Workshop on New Phenomena in Mesoscopic Systems was held at ICTP-SAIFR from November 14 - 15 and organized by Amnon Aharony and Ora Entin-Wohlman (Ben Gurion & Tel Aviv U.) and Carlos Egues (IFSC-USP). Topics of the workshop included spintronics, thermoelectricity and topological insulators.



XIII Workshop on New Physics in Space

This 13th edition of this biannual meeting was held at ICTP-SAIFR on Nov. 28 - Dec. 2 and organized by a committee chaired by Reuven Opher (IAG-USP) and including Rogério Rosenfeld (ICTP-SAIFR/IFT-UNESP). The workshop consisted of 30 seminars and daily discussions on recent progress in general relativity, cosmology and astronomy.



Movshev minicourse on pure spinors

On December 2, Prof. Mikhail Movshev (SUNY at Stony Brook) began a 4-week minicourse entitled ‘Beta gamma systems on affine cones and local cohomology: Computation of pure spinor correlation functions' where he shows how local algebras can be used to give an accurate mathematical description of beta-gamma systems on pure spinors.



Workshop on Analytic Methods in General Relativity

From Dec. 5-9, the Workshop on Analytic Methods in General Relativity took place at ICTP-SAIFR and was organized by Rafael Porto (ICTP-SAIFR) and Riccardo Sturani (IIP, Natal). The workshop included seminars and informal discussions on state-of-the-art computations of the dynamics of binary compact objects in general relativity that are relevant for gravitational wave detection.



Papos de Física - December

In the monthly meeting of this program on December 6, Renata Funchal (FMA-USP) presented the seminar “Neutrinos: de quimeras a ases do universo” in which she discussed the oscillation process where neutrinos change from one flavour to another as they propagate through space and new experiments aiming to detect high-energy neutrinos.



Um dia de Física no ICTP-SAIFR/IFT-UNESP

On December 17, ICTP-SAIFR organized a visit at the institute for high-school students, their parents and teachers. The visit included a pedagogical lecture on topics in modern physics by Pedro Vieira (ICTP-SAIFR/IFT-UNESP/Perimeter) as well as a brief overview of ICTP-SAIFR research and activities.



Forthcoming events:

VI Southern-Summer School on Mathematical Biology (January 16-27, 2017)

School on interaction of Light with Cold Atoms (Jan. 30 - Feb. 10, 2017)

School of Biological Soft Matter: from molecular interactions to engineered materials (March 13-24, 2017)

School on AdS/CMT correspondence (March 27 - April 7, 2017)

Workshop on Solitons: Integrability, Duality and Applications (April 18-21, 2017)

São Paulo Dark Matter Workshop (May 10 – 12, 2017)

Program on Conformal Bootstrap (May 15 – June 16, 2017)

Simons Non-perturbative Bootstrap School (May 22 – 29, 2017)



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