Integrated Calendar

I will present some recent results about supersymmetric indices, partition functions and related observables that can be computed exactly on a large class of supersymmetric background geometries, in three- and four-dimensional gauge theories with four flat-space supercharges. I will emphasize interesting relationships between these observables, and their common origin in a A-twisted topological field theory in two dimensions

Title; ‘Sharing Speeds Science: Intro to Addgene's Nonprofit Science Model

Info; addgene is a nonprofit organization founded to help scientists share materials and useful data across borders around the world. Addgene has distributed over 750,000 plasmids to scientists in 85 countries. This movement of samples has influenced fields from Stem Cells to CRISPR and almost everything in between. Addgene's Executive Director, Joanne Kamens will present on this unique compnay model, what's new with Addgene and about what it is like to be an Addgenie.

Dr. Kamens is the Executive Director of Addgene, a mission driven, nonprofit dedicated to helping scientists around the world share useful research reagents and data. Dr. Kamens received her PhD in Genetics from Harvard Medical School then spent 15 years as a researcher and manager in Pharma at BASF/Abbott working on both small molecule and antibody therapies for immune disease. In 2007 she joined RXi Pharmaceuticals as Senior Director of Research Collaborations. Dr. Kamens founded the current Boston chapter of the Association for Women in Science. She has helped start and supports many scientist mentoring programs with training and best practices. In 2010, Dr. Kamens received the Catalyst Award from the Science Club for Girls for longstanding dedication to empowering women in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics and in 2013, she was named one of PharmaVoice's 100 Most Inspiring Commanders & Chiefs. She serves on a number of other non-profit boards and speaks widely on career development and workplace diversity topics in person and via Webinar.

The control of quantum states is essential both for fundamental investigations and for technological applications of quantum physics. In quantum few-body systems, decoherence arising from interaction with the environment hinders the realization of desired processes. In quantum many-body systems, complexity of their dynamics further makes state preparation via external manipulation highly non-trivial. An effective strategy to counter these effects is offered by quantum optimal control theory, exploiting quantum coherence to dynamically reach a desired goal with high accuracy even under limitations on resources such as time, bandwidth, and precision. In this talk I will:
- introduce the quantum optimal control method we developed to this aim, the CRAB (Chopped Random Basis) algorithm, which is to date the only method that allows to perform optimal control of quantum many-body systems;
- present experimental results obtained via its application to various physical systems, from quantum logical operations in solid-state quantum optics to quantum criticality in ultra-cold atoms, both in open-loop and in closed-loop feedback scenarios, with applications ranging from quantum interferometry with Bose-Einstein condensates on atom chips to magnetic field sensing in diamond NV centers and to the preparation of optical-lattice quantum registers for quantum simulation;
- use these examples to illustrate the quantum speed limit, i.e. the maximum speed achievable for a given quantum transformation, and describe related effects of nonlinearity due to inter-particle interactions and more in general to dynamical complexity;
- propose a way to characterise the latter in an information-theoretical fashion by the bandwidth of the optimized control pulses, as well as a conjecture about using this method for discrimination between different levels of complexity in quantum many-body systems.