Speaker
Description
The study of time-reversal symmetry (T) has played a major role in the history of physics and is central to several frontier of research today. In this series of lectures, I will review the foundations of our current understanding and then both critique and build on that understanding.
The series will have four parts. In Part 1 I will introduce basic concepts in increasingly rich contexts, building up to the standard model, where I’ll demonstrate the great result that approximate T symmetry is a “semi-accidental” consequence of deeper principles. In Part 2 I will expose a very specific and profound limitation of that result, connected to quantum anomalies. Closing that loophole leads us to suggest the existence of a new kind of particle, the axion, which has become a leading candidate to provide the dark matter of the universe and is presently inspiring many investigations. In the third part I will discuss phenomenological implications of T in physics, including applications both to fundamental physics and to materials. In the fourth part I will discuss how and in what sense biology breaks spatial parity P at the molecular level, and pose the analogous questions for T.
