Physics Colloquium: Sarah Shandera

The Syracuse University Physics Department is pleased to welcome Dr. Sarah Shandera, Director of the Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos at Penn State.

Dr. Shandera received her PhD in physics from Cornell University and held postdoctoral positions at Columbia University’s Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics and at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics before joining the faculty at The Pennsylvania State University in 2011. She is the recipient of the C.I. Noll Award for Excellence in Teaching at Penn State, a Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Fundamental Physics Innovation Award and is a visiting fellow at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Abstract:

“Open Quantum Systems and Cosmology”

Gravity creates space-time boundaries that limit observables without limiting the flow of information. This means that quantum systems in cosmology are often open systems: to describe them we must include the effects of interaction with an unobservable environment. Dr. Shandera will explain the kinds of open systems that occur in cosmology and show how understanding them might give us new insight into old puzzles. Along the way Dr. Shandera will describe the relationship between quantum systems in cosmology and those being actively explored for condensed matter physics, quantum computing and quantum communication.