Issue 1, 2014
Issue 3, 2012
Professor Alexander Balatsky joined the Nordita Faculty in August 2012.
His field of research is theoretical condensed matter physics where he has made a number of seminal contributions. His recent work has mainly been in strongly correlated materials, unconventional superconductivity, and biomolecular electronics.
Professor Balatsky received his PhD in 1987 at the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics and Moscow Physical Technical Institute in Moscow. He comes to Nordita from Los Alamos National Laboratory and has previously held positions at the Landau Institute and the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.
Stephen Powell joined the Nordita Faculty as an Assistant Professor of Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics.
His work has focuses on phase transitions in quantum systems, including fermion-?boson mixtures near a Feshbach resonance and spin dynamics near the superfluid-?insulator transition of cold atoms in optical lattices. He has developed a theory of a wide class of frustrated systems exhibiting ?spin-?liquid? states and exotic phase transitions. His recent work includes spin vortices and Majorana fermions in cold atomic systems.
Prior to joining Nordita, Stephen Powell was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maryland. He received his PhD from Yale University in 2007.
Eight new postdoctoral fellows have started at Nordita in the fall of 2012.
Post-doctoral fellow Ebru Devlen will be joining Nordita in October 2012. She received her PhD in 2008 from the University of Ege in Turkey. She is working in the field of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) and plasma astrophysics. Her field of research is the study of accretion disks, especially understanding angular momentum transport due to MHD instabilities. Her fellowship at Nordita is supported by a grant from the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK).
Nordita Fellow Blaise Goutéraux received his PhD in 2010 at Univ. Paris-Sud XI (Orsay), under the supervision of Pr. Christos Charmousis. He then spent two years as a Research and Teaching fellow at APC, Univ. Paris Diderot before joining Nordita.
His research interests include holography applied to strongly-coupled Condensed Matter systems (AdS/CMT) or hydrodynamics (Fluid/Gravity), higher-dimensional gravity (Lovelock theory, blackfolds) and modifications of General Relativity.
Postdoctoral fellow Andong He works on fluid mechanics, with a focus on Hele-Shaw flows and inter-facial dynamics. He uses mathematical methods, including complex variables and asymptotic analysis, and simple lab experiments to tackle these problems. Recently, his research interests have broadened to kinetic theory of gases and capillary interactions between floating objects.
Nordita Fellow Sreejith Ganesh Jaya received his PhD from The Pennsylvania State University in 2012. His work aims at developing a better understanding of the nature of the fractional quantum Hall states in the second Landau level. He has also worked on developing models to explain the mismatch between experimental observations and previous theoretical models of the FQH edge.
Nordita Fellow Juha Jäykkä comes to Nordita from the University of Leeds. He received his PhD in 2009 from the University of Turku. His current research is divided between superconductivity, the family of Skyrme models, and the numerical techniques required in their study; recently he has started to also study topological insulators.
Nordita Fellow Mikhail Modestov received his Ph.D. from Umeå University in 2012. He is interested in theoretical studies and numerical simulations of various phenomena related to front propagation and stability, and is working on fronts in laser ablation and chemical flame fronts propagation,
collective behaviour in quantum plasma, doping fronts in organic semiconductors, wave of magnetization reversal in molecular magnets and Rayleigh-Taylor instability in astrophysical objects.
Nordita Fellow Anthony van Eysden received his PhD in Astrophysics in 2011 from the University of Melbourne and a second PhD degree in Applied Mathematics in 2012. His primary research interest is on the state of matter inside the super-dense interiors of neutron stars. By considering radio pulsar timing data and gravitational waves, Anthony has shown how the transport coefficients and equation of state of bulk nuclear matter can be constrained through observations of the recovery of a pulsar after a timing glitch. He is also interested in terrestrial superfluids, where his modeling of superfluid neutron and proton condensates has also been successfully applied to explain liquid helium experiments.
Nordita Fellow Donovan Young received his PhD in 2007 from the University of British Columbia. Since then he has held postdocs in Berlin, at Humboldt University, and most recently at the Niels Bohr Institute. He has been working on gauge-gravity duality in general, with special focus on AdS/CFT. Recently he has been interested in three-point functions, Wilson loops, and aspects of three dimensional SYM theory.
Professor Gunnlaugur Björnsson from the Science Institute, University of Iceland is visiting Nordita for three months. He is a high-energy astrophysics theorist with main interests in accretion onto black holes, gamma-ray bursts and cosmology. He is also interested in the solar-terrestrial relations.
During his visit between September and November, he will be concentrating on the luminosity function of gamma-ray burst host galaxies, and will be collaborating with the Nordita astrophysics group.
Professor Brett McInnes from the National University of Singapore is visitng NORDITA from July to December 2012. He has worked on various applications of differential geometry to particle physics and cosmology. Currently he is interested in using the AdS/CFT correspondence to study systems with large angular momentum densities, such as arise for example in peripheral heavy-ion collisions.
Nordita invites the international scientific community to submit proposals for Nordita programs for the second half of 2014 and early 2015. A Nordita Scientific Program is an extended workshop where scientists come together to work on specific topics for a period of 4 to 6 weeks. Program topics can range beyond the traditional borders of theoretical physics and scientists in related areas of the natural sciences are encouraged to submit proposals. Normally, two or three principal investigators are responsible for coordinating a program and up to 25 participants can be accommodated at any given time. Program can include focus events (conferences, workshops or schools) with a higher number of participants for shorter periods.
The deadline for submitting program proposals is November 15, 2012. For further information, please consult our
Program Proposal Guidelines.
The appointment will be for a period of five years, fixed term, starting in August 2013 or at some other date to be agreed on. Particular attention will be paid to applications from young scientists (PhD within the last five years) with a strong record of original research. The successful applicant is expected to guide fellows at the postdoctoral level, to interact with colleagues at Nordita and its environment as well as elsewhere in the Nordic countries, and to take an active part in the organization of meetings and advanced courses. The position provides excellent opportunities to pursue original research and to have contact with a wide range of developments in theoretical physics. There is good support for travel to other institutes and to meetings, and assistant professors are encouraged to invite visiting scientists to Nordita.
Appointments are for two years starting 1 September, 2013 or some other date to be agreed upon. The fellowships are intended for scientists who have a recent PhD, completed less than 5 years before the starting date of the fellowship, and wish to carry out research in fields represented at Nordita. Candidates working in other areas will be considered when it is scientifically justified.
A one-year post-doctoral position is available at Nordita to work on a project "Turbulence in polymer solutions". The position is supported by the Swedish Research Council. The successful candidate shall work under the supervision of Assistant Professor Dhrubaditya Mitra.
The Nordita masterclass of 2012 was run from 28th of July 2012 to 3rd of August 2012 at Danhostel Hillerød; Nordisk Lejrskole & Kursuscenter in Hillerød, a picturesque town north of Copenhagen, Denmark. Students from all the nordic countries were present. Each morning there were four hours of lectures, followed by another four hours of exercise sessions in the afternoon. During the exercise sessions the students were divided into smaller groups and had a chance of closer interaction with the lecturers.
The focus was on five different topics from diverse branches of theoretical physics, v.i.z, Cosmology, Dark Matter, and Dark Energy by Øystein Elgarøy, University of Oslo, Physics of Climates by John Wettlaufer, Yale University and Nordita, The Higgs Boson, the Standard Model and Beyond by Mads T. Frandsen, University of Oxford, Topology in Condensed Matter Physics by Hans Hansson, Stockholm University, and Planet Formation by Kleomenis Tsiganis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
The students participated eagerly and enthusiastically in the program, the atmosphere was fantastic, the food was excellent, although the weather was often disappointing.
Non-locality appears in different approaches to understand the quantum structure of space time, and it plays a role in many attempts to resolve the black hole information loss problem. This workshop was dedicated to discussing the different variants of non-locality that exist, and to shed light on their interrelations.
Participants' contributions covered a wide variety of approaches, from non-commutative geometry, over pseudo-differential operators, emergent gravity, and AdS/CFT, to quantum groups and modifications of the geometry of phase-space that can induce what has become known as "relative locality." Two discussion sessions allowed to deepen the exchange on selected topics that had sparked interest, especially the question of phenomenological consequences, black hole information loss, and the identification of physical observables when it is not clear how to operationally define positions.
Many of the participants of this workshop communicated that the exchange was very helpful to them and they learned of connections between their own and other participant's work that they had not been aware of.
October 1?26, 2012
Holography has emerged as one of the most fascinating and powerful new concepts in modern theoretical physics. Some of the most exciting current and future advances in the field build on two amazing prospects of the AdS/CFT correspondence, and thereby the Holographic Principle. On the one hand, the AdS/CFT correspondence offers a way to study strongly coupled gauge theories, and more generally strongly coupled systems with many degrees of freedom. Conversely, it offers a way for understanding the quantum states and the quantum behavior of black holes.
Coordinators: Troels Harmark, Niels Obers, Marta Orselli, Donovan Young
November 5?30, 2012
Current cosmology provides a fascinating mix of a wealth of new observational data with deep conceptual problems still to be addressed. Several approaches in the general context of quantum gravity aim at a fundamental description of the relevant stages in the history of the universe, but none of them appears to be fully convincing and comparisons between different directions are difficult to draw. This workshop brings together a large set of experts, from both fundamental and phenomenological theory, in order to provide a snapshot of the current status and to focus future activities.
Coordinators: Sabine Hossenfelder, Kristina Giesel, Mairi Sakellariadou, Martin Bojowald
October 15?17, 2012
Among the topics of this EANA workshop are extrasolar planets, astrophysics and astrochemistry, geochemical origin of life, origin and evolution of the biosphere, planetary habitability and exploration, extremophiles and early life, astrobiology on the International Space Station, and artificial life.
Coordinators: Axel Brandenburg, Fabio Del Sordo, Nils Holm, Wolf Geppert, Gianni Cataldi, Engy Ahmed
October 15?18, 2012
The conference is part of the program The Holographic Way: String Theory, Gauge Theory and Black Holes
Coordinators: Troels Harmark, Niels Obers, Marta Orselli, Donovan Young
→ Link to electronic preprints: www.nordita.org/preprints
The following preprints have been posted to the Nordita on-line archive since the last newsletter issue:
If you have information about meetings or other items that would be useful to include in Nordita News, please send it to Anne Jifält, Nordita, email: anne@kth.se.
For back issues of the Nordita newsletter, see www.nordita.org/news/nordita_news/available_issues.