January 10
The Glorious Days of Physics: Renormalization of Gauge Theories
Gerard ‘t Hooft, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1999
Institute for Theoretical Physics, Universiteit Utrecht
January 17
No Colloquium: Martin Luther King Day, University Holiday
January 24
From Gravity to Gauge Theories via Branes
Igor Klebanov
Dept. of Physics, Princeton University
January 31
Green Chemistry in China
Academician Qingshi Zhu
Dept. of Chemical Physics, and President, University of Science and Technology, China
February 7
Theory and Simulation of Solitary Wave Fields in the Auroral Ionosphere
Martin V. Goldman
Dept. of Physics, Univ. of Colorado, Boulder
February 14
X-ray Spectroscopy and Astrophysical Winds
Patrick Wojdowski
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
February 21
No Colloquium: Presidents’ Day, University Holiday
February 28
Physics Beyond the Standard Models at Super-Kamiokande
Ken Ganezer
Dept. of Physics California State University, Dominguez Hills
March 6
Subcellular Targeting of Proteins in Neurons: A Biolistic Approach
Don Arnold
Department of Biological Sciences, USC
March 13
No Colloquium: Spring Recess, March 13-18
March 20
The Hubble Space Telescope Key Project to Measure the Hubble Constant
Wendy Freedman
Carnegie Observatories, Pasadena
March 27
Trapped Nonneutral Plasmas, Fluids, and Crystals
Dan Dubin
Dept. of Physics, Univ. of California, San Diego
April 3
Superstring Phenomenology and Cosmology
Michael Dine
Dept. of Physics, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz
April 10
X-ray Astronomy of Compact Objects: Galactic Neutron Stars and Black Holes
Bob Rutledge
Space Radiation Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
April 17
Battling Decoherence: The Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computer
John Preskill
Division of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy, California Institute of Technology
Abstract
Information is something that can be encoded in the state of a physical system, and a computation is a task that can be performed with a physically realizable device. Therefore, since the physical world is fundamentally quantum mechanical, the foundations of information theory and computer science should be sought in quantum physics. In fact, quantum information has weird properties that contrast sharply with the familiar properties of classical information. A quantum computer — a new type of machine that exploits the quantum properties of information — could perform certain types of calculations far more efficiently than any foreseeable classical computer. To construct practical quantum computers will be tremendously challenging. A particularly daunting difficulty is that quantum computers are far more susceptible to making errors than conventional digital computers. I will explain the principles of fault-tolerant quantum computation, which can enable a properly designed quantum computer with imperfect components to achieve good reliability.
April 24
Internet 2
Carl Kesselman
Information Sciences Institute (Marina del Rey), USC