Issue 1, 2014
Issue 3, 2010
Nordita welcomes several new staff at Nordita, including the new professor of high energy physics, three new Nordita fellows (with another three arriving later this fall), as well as two visiting professors. We wish all of them a pleasant and productive time at Nordita!
Professor Konstantin Zarembo started at Nordita on September 1. His field of research is theoretical high energy physics where he has made a number of seminal contributions. His recent work has mainly been in the
area of integrability in gauge theories and string theory. Professor Zarembo
received his PhD in 1997 at the Steklov Mathematical Institute in Moscow.
He comes to Nordita from École Normale Supérieure in Paris and has previously
held positions at Uppsala University and the University of British Columbia in
Vancouver. He has selected Uppsala University for his tenured professorship
but will be on extended leave from that position while serving at Nordita,
in accordance with the agreement on Nordita professorships between
the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm University, and Uppsala University.
His office is 132:007.
Professor Bengt Gustafsson is emeritus professor at the University of
Uppsala. This fall he will be spending time at Nordita to work on the
theory of the formation of pre-main-sequence stars. Textbooks tell us that
these stars have undergone a temporary phase where they stayed somewhere
along the Hayashi line for some time and were thus fully convective.
However, they did not get hot enough in their interior to burn lithium, and
in the ensuing progress towards the main sequence the gradually warmer
radiative core developed but did not allow much of the burnt Li-free
material to the surface. This poses a problem for observed Li in the Sun,
which seems depleted by two orders of magnitude and thus must have been
mixed and burnt in the core. Instead, much of the lithium still prevails,
and new theory suggests that this textbook explanation is flawed, Various
ideas about mechanisms that have provided the extra mixing needed are
around, mainly related to the rotationally driven circulation and shear
instabilities. Gustafsson will explore another current idea, that stars
form through gradual accretion onto a core that got quite hot but was never
fully convective. He will relate the result to recent results that the
solar surface composition is affected by infall of chemically fractionated
material from the remains of the proto-planetary disk. Bengt's stay at
Nordita promises to be an exciting time for us at Nordita and its
surrounding environment. He plans to be here mostly on Wednesdays and is
sitting in 122:004.
Professor Leonid Kitchatinov from the
Institute for Solar-Terrestrial Physics, in Irkutsk, Russia, will participate
in the ERC project on astrophysical dynamos.
His main interests include late-type stars (especially the theory of
differential rotation, dynamos, and spin-down),
the Sun (especially dynamo models, sunspots),
the Global stability of rotating fluids, and
mean-field MHD (especially the theory of turbulent diffusion, alpha-effect,
turbulent transport of angular momentum).
Kitchatinov has contributed to the first
meaningful predictions about stellar differential rotation,
the discovery of the magnetically controlled tachocline, as well as
the magneto-rotational instability at low magnetic Prandtl numbers.
During his stay at Nordita he plans to focus on stellar spin-down
and turbulent transport in the tachocline.
He is sitting in 122:017.
Dr. Chi?Kwan Chan, or CK for short,
received his PhD in 2007 from the University of Arizona and then
worked at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
CK's primary area of expertise is numerical simulations of hydrodynamic
and magnetohydrodynamic flows, especially with applications to accretion disks.
Dr. Sean Nowling received his PhD in 2007 from the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was a post-doc
at the University of Helsinki before joining Nordita.
His recent work is on gauge theory/gravity duality and its application to condensed matter systems while previously he has worked on entanglement entropy in Chern-Simons quantum field theories and on time-dependent backgrounds in string theory.
Dr. Sigurdur Örn Stefánsson received his PhD from the University of Iceland in 2010.
He works on mathematical physics including various models of random trees and random growth processes.
All Nordita positions are announced through the job application manager, jam.nordita.org, where one also finds electronic application forms.
Visiting PhD student fellowships
A Visiting PhD Fellowship will be awarded for a period of one to four months, providing accommodation and a contribution towards travel and living expenses in Stockholm. Fellows must be registered PhD students in theoretical physics or a related subject at a university in the Nordic or Baltic countries at the time of the fellowship visit to Nordita.
Nordita Post-Doctoral Fellowships
Post-doc in Astrophysical Dynamos
In connection with a 5-year project on Astrophysical Dynamos, there is a vacancy for a 2-year post-doc position at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (Nordita) in Stockholm. The project is supported through an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council to improve our understanding of astrophysical dynamos. For details, see the project page http://www.nordita.org/~brandenb/AstroDyn/ on Astrophysical Dynamos.
The first 18 months of the Astrophysical Dynamo project are now over. This project has led to considerable activity in the Nordita astrophysics building with regular Wednesday seminars, group meetings, as well as astro-ph meetings organized by our Nordita fellow Niccolo Bucciantini.
The objectives for the first reporting period and the corresponding achievements can be inspected at http://www.nordita.org/~brandenb/AstroDyn/progress/report1/. In this report, 34 scientific publications are listed that all acknowledge the ERC grant. Work done within the framework of this project has been presented at several conferences, especially at the Symposium 271 of the International Astronomical Union in Nice in June 2010. The project has also been presented through a interview with the PI by British Publishers in January 2010: Cycles of the Sun, http://www.projectsmagazine.eu.com/randd_projects/cycles_of_the_sun, and http://www.nordita.org/~brandenb/AstroDyn/material/Solar_Activity_10.pdf.
Nordita programs are open events. Anyone can apply. Participation is however limited to a maximum of about 25 participants. Notifications will be sent out by Nordita. See the list of all Nordita programs on our home paper, or on: http://agenda.albanova.se/categoryDisplay.py?categId=270
from 27 September 2010 to 29 October 2010
→ Details and application form
The interdisciplinary field of quantum information processing and communication connects at its deepest level quantum mechanics, photonics, solid state physics, atomic physics, and electronics with computer science and information theory in order to gain features in cryptography, communication, and computing that are impossible to achieve using classical methods. Quantum information science has also revitalized the discussions about the foundations of quantum theory. This field has grown explosively and is now one of the hottest subfields of both computer science and physics.
The scientific program on Quantum Information is primarily focusing on physical and theoretical aspects of quantum information processing and communication, as well as on their physical implementation. The aim of the program is to bring together key and active researchers in the foundations of quantum mechanics, quantum information theory, quantum communication, quantum key distribution, and quantum computing to review, present and discuss recent important results.
from 01 November 2010 to 10 December 2010
→ Details and application form
The goal of this program is to bring together leading researchers in random geometry and related fields that represent a broad selection of the topics previously mentioned. It is our hope to create an environment of intensive research and mutual interaction between workers in the field across the traditional subject borders, and at the same time providing young researchers from the Nordic countries with an ideal opportunity to enter a field of research that covers a rich variety of appropriate research topics.
from 12 to 17 December 2010
→ Details and application form
The impressively successful classical theories on phase transitions are based on the thermodynamic limit, which implies in?nitely large or small extension on all the systems that are considered. These theories fail, however, to address many important aspects, as ?niteness in extension is apparent in most physical systems. The question is of highly generic nature and has signi?cance within condensed matter physics, chemistry as well as biology.
A new Nordita Board has been appointed for a three-year term starting
July 1, 2010. The board members are:
Chairman:
Thordur Jonsson, University of Iceland
Denmark:
Jes Madsen, University of Århus, Karsten Flensberg,
University of Copenhagen (reserve member)
Finland:
Kalle-Antti Suominen, University of Turku,
Keijo Hämäläinen, University of Helsinki (reserve member)
Iceland:
Gunnlaugur Björnsson, University of Iceland,
Ivan Shelykh, University of Iceland (reserve member)
Norway:
Susanne Viefers, University of Oslo,
Per Osland, University of Bergen (reserve member)
Sweden:
Lars Börjesson, Chalmers Technical University,
Olle Eriksson, Uppsala University (reserve member)
The next meeting of the Nordita Board will be in Stockholm on September 24, 2010.
→ 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 http://www.nordita.org/news/nordita_news/available_issues/index.php