The formalism of quantum mechanics was developed over many decades, through the first half of the 20th century. The fundamentals were collected in a monograph by Dirac, called "The Principles of Quantum Mechanics." Sakurai developed a course using this non-historical approach, which was eventually published as a graduate level textbook called "Modern Quantum Mechanics", in 1985. A second edition of this book was published in 2010, and included various new topics, as well as more direct references to experiments.

After introducing this history, I will go through four explicit updates in the new textbook. These are the wave mechanics of a "bouncing ball", the degeneracies in the hydrogen atom, manifestations of Berry's "geometric phase", and the theory and experimental verification of the Casimir effect.

The OPERA neutrino experiment at the underground Gran Sasso Laboratory has measured the velocity of neutrinos from the CERN CNGS beam over a baseline of about 730 km with much higher accuracy than previous studies conducted with accelerator neutrinos. The speed of the neutrino has been observed to be larger than the speed of light. The method used for this measurement will be described in details and the result discussed.

I will begin with a review of perturbative heterotic vacua with N=2 spacetime supersymmetry. When such a vacuum is described by a non-linear sigma model, I will show that worldsheet supersymmetry requires the compactification geometry to be a principal torus bundle over a K3 manifold. In the second part of the talk, I will argue that a Calabi-Yau type IIA dual of such a vacuum should be based on a K3-fibered Calabi-Yau three-fold without a compatible elliptic fibration.

The T2K (Tokai to Kamiokande) experiment observes indications of electron neutrino appearance in an almost pure muon neutrino beam. The neutrinos were produced at the JPARC accelerator complex in eastern Japan and detected in the Super-Kamiokande detector, 295 kilometers away under the Japanese alps. In this talk, I will introduce the T2K experiment and explain the electron neutrino appearance analysis including its interpretation in our standard picture of three-flavor neutrino oscillations. I will also briefly discuss future prospects for T2K and some of the implications for the larger world-wide neutrino program.

Neutrinos are perhaps the most mysterious and intriguing fundamental particles known to exist in nature. It took 40 years to determine that they have tiny, non-zero masses, and even today neutrino mass properties can only be inferred indirectly through quantum mechanical interference effects. So why should nature give us a particle which is so extraordinarily light, and yet not exactly massless? Our best hope to unravel this puzzle is to address a closely related question: is the neutrino its own anti-particle? Unfortunately, there has been little direct experimental progress on these issues in the last ten years, but now several ambitious new experiments are promising to significantly advance the frontier in relatively short order. The first such experiment to come online is the EXO-200 experiment. An order of magnitude larger than all previous efforts, EXO-200 has already made the first observation of the ultra-rare two-neutrino double beta decay of the Xenon-136 nucleus. The half-life of this decay, at 2.11x10^21 years, ranks it as the longest half-life ever directly observed in nature, and yet it was seen and accurately measured by EXO-200 with only six weeks of data. Due to this demonstrated sensitivity, we expect to shed some welcome light on the critical questions of neutrino mass in the near future.

Outflows from galaxies powered by an active galactic nucleus (AGN) contribute to the formation and evolution of supermassive black holes, their host galaxies, the surrounding IGM, and cluster cooling flows. Nearby AGN provide local analogs that can help us to understand the mechanics, energetics, and chemical enrichment patterns that may play a significant role in cosmic evolution at high redshift. More than half of low-redshift AGN exhibit blue-shifted UV or X-ray absorption features indicative of outflowing gas. Understanding the geometry and the location of the outflow relative to the active nucleus is a key to understanding the processes driving the outflow and to making an accurate assessment of the total mass and the kinetic luminosity involved. Most theoretical models require mechanical feedback of 5% or more of the AGN's bolometric luminosity to significantly impact the evolution of the host galaxy. I will present recent UV and X-ray observations that allow us to establish the density of the outflowing absorbing gas using recombination-time arguments and density-sensitive absorption lines. In combination with photoionization models, this provides the needed distance estimates that allow us to measure the kinetic luminosity and to assess the impact of the outflow on the host galaxy.

October 25, 2011 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Evariste Galois: October 25, 1811 - May 31,1832. As you can see from the date of his death, he was a mere 20 years old when he died of wounds suffered during a duel. Anticipating his own death, he wrote two papers the night before the fateful duel in which he invents Group Theory, and applies it to the proof that the quintic equation cannot be solved by radicals. These papers were discovered posthumously by the French academy, and Galois' name has been immortalized.

Though the above story is well known to most math enthusiasts, and Group Theory is used in physics extensively, the details of Galois Theory remains unbeknownst to most physics students (and faculty), and one must take a course in advanced algebra to learn anything about it. And even then, the approach used by mathematicians is a very hard nut to crack.

In this talk, I attempt to remedy the situation by bringing in the idea of Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking from physics. I will review the solutions to the quadratic, cubic, and quartic equations using radicals, and show that the formulae accomplish the task of finding the solutions by implementing a sequence of symmetry breakings following a specific pattern. I then show why this cannot be done for the quintic.

I will cover two topics that both have to do with dark matter detection. First, I will address the question whether the recent claims from direct detection experiments CoGeNT, DAMA and CRESST, can be due to dark matter, and what they would imply for the properties of the DM. In the second part I will address the question whether flavor violation is important for dark matter production and detection.

In this talk I will introduce the new concept of ``Mondian'' dark matter which reconciles the cold dark matter paradigm with the phenomenological successes of Milgrom's scaling. I will outline some generic signatures of this new concept in astronomy and in particle physics.

Like many galaxies of its size, the Milky Way is a disk with prominent spiral arms rooted in a central bar, although our knowledge of its structure and origin is incomplete. Traditional attempts to understand the Galaxy's morphology assume that it has been unperturbed by major external forces. Here we report simulations of the response of the Milky Way to the infall of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy (Sgr), which results in the formation of spiral arms, influences the central bar and produces a flared outer disk. Two ring-like wrappings emerge towards the Galactic anti-Center in our model that are reminiscent of the low- latitude arcs observed in the same area of the Milky Way. Previous models have focused on Sgr itself to reproduce the dwarf's orbital history and place associated constraints on the shape of the Milky Way gravitational potential, treating the Sgr impact event as a trivial influence on the Galactic disk. Our results show that the Milky Way's morphology is not purely secular in origin and that low-mass minor mergers predicted to be common throughout the Universe probably have a similarly important role in shaping galactic structure.

This talk discusses the overlap of the Hori-Vafa formulation of mirror symmetry with some other constructions. We focus on compact Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces in weighted complex projective spaces. The Hori-Vafa formalism relates a family of such hypersurfaces to a single Landau-Ginzburg mirror theory. A technique suggested by Hori and Vafa allows the Picard-Fuchs equations satisfied by the corresponding mirror periods to be determined. Some examples in which the Calabi-Yau hypersurface is crepantly resolved are considered. The resulting Picard-Fuchs equations agree with those found elsewhere working in the Batyrev-Borisov framework. When the hypersurface is defined by an invertible nondegenerate quasihomogeneous polynomial, the Chiodo-Ruan geometrical interpretation of Berglund-Hubsch-Krawitz duality can be used to associate a particular complex structure for the Calabi-Yau hypersurface with a particular Kahler structure for the mirror. We make this association for such hypersurfaces when the ambient space of the hypersurface is a projective space of dimension less than five. Finally, we probe some of the resulting mirror Kahler structures by determining corresponding Picard-Fuchs equations.

In spite of the enormous progress that has been done over the last 15 years in establishing the neutrino mixing pattern, our knowledge on how neutrinos mix is still incomplete: only two mixing angles and two squared mass differences are presently known. I will summarize some of the alternatives we have for the future to try to determine the three main unknowns related to neutrino mixing (θ₁₃, the CP violating phase in the leptonic sector δ, and the hierarchy followed by neutrino mass eigenstates) through the observation of neutrino oscillations, and what are the new challenges that the community will have to face in the near future if θ₁₃ turns out to be as large as the most recent experimental results seem to indicate.

Black holes are thermodynamical objects providing a window into quantum gravity through the interpretation of their entropy in terms of statistical mechanics (microscopic degrees of freedom). In this talk, I will review some of the famous puzzles emerging in black holes physics when reconciling General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics (information paradox and the physics seen by an in falling observer). This will be done from the modern perspective offered by the AdS/CFT correspondence and will include some critical discussion on both, recent ideas and developments labelled as fuzzball, and old euclidean path integral formulations.

Testing the symmetries of the Standard Model and gravity is important, because small violation of these symmetries might carry signatures of Planck scale physics. While CPT and Lorentz symmetry violations in the Standard Model have been heavily studied in the literature, gauge non-invariance has been usually ignored. However, the possible interest in the idea of "emergent gauge symmetry" necessitates attention to this topic since tests of this idea should include the study of gauge symmetry violation, as also motivated by Witten-Weinberg theorem. In this talk, I will discuss how this theorem implies that the gauge-Lorentz symmetry violation may come along together and argue that gauge symmetry of the Standard Model as well should be constrained in order to increase the sensitivity of the test. I will also discuss the diffeomorphism invariance breaking in gravity and elaborate on its phenomenological consequences.

Nuclear weapons, dirty bombs and sabotage of nuclear installations pose extraordinary threats to the security of nations, mass casualties and economic peril. The presentation will review contemporary threats and the national and international measures in place to limit the risks, noting that our luck has held since 1945 but there are no guarantees for today or tomorrow. The presentation includes consideration of the technological means to prevent, deter, detect and interdict actions that may raise significant threats, and possible careers in the areas of nuclear security.

The field of nuclear astrophysics is concerned with the question of energy production and nucleosynthesis of the elements in quiescent and explosive stellar environments. Key reactions are charged particle interactions at low energy which determined the abundance distribution up to iron and play a critical role in providing the seed material for the nucleosynthesis of heavier elements. Charged particle reactions in quiescent stellar burning also determine the lifetime of the evolutionary burning stages of stars and therefore need to be studied at the characteristic temperatures of the stellar environment. Because of the extremely low cross sections of these reactions direct measurements are not available except for two cases and the determination of stellar reaction rates relies largely on theoretical extrapolation of existing higher energy data. A number of new methods have been developed over the last decade to improve the experimental data at low energies. Most notably experiments in a underground, cosmic ray background free environment have contributed greatly to our understanding of stellar hydrogen burning. This talk will summarize some of the critical experiments, which, coupled with the development of new theoretical methods addressed questions of energy production, nucleosynthesis, and neutrino production in stellar hydrogen burning environment. New plans for developing new facilities and methods will be presented.

Black holes are inferred to exist at the centers of all massive galaxies, including our own. We cannot see such a black hole directly, but we can see light from gas influenced by the black hole's gravity; we call this light a quasar. For 70 years we have seen emission from gas orbiting these black holes in accretion disks which heat up through friction and give off light. For 45 years we have in some cases seen absorption from gas streaming AWAY from the black holes, presumably in winds lifted from the surface of these disks. Just last year, I discovered some cases of absorption which may arise in gas streaming INTO the black holes. In some of these quasars, it is difficult to explain the speeds at which the gas appears to be falling into the black holes. These objects may instead be cases of normal quasar winds in binary black hole systems, or of relativistic time dilation in gas moving at 20 percent of lightspeed transverse to our line of sight.

Neutrino mixing is consistent with three generations of neutrinos and a unitary mixing matrix. However, there is tension between the LSND experiments result of antineutrino oscillation at short baseline and the lack of such observation with the analogous result of the MiniBooNE experiment with neutrinos, indicating a possible third Δm² around 1 eV² due to more than three neutrino generations or other exotic physics. A complementary way to access the same physics as ν_e appearance is ν_μ disappearance. The MiniBooNE-only ν_μ and ν^*_μ disappearance search was limited by flux and cross section uncertainties, which are reduced with the addition of data from the SciBooNE experiment, also present in the Fermilab Booster Neutrino beamline. This talk will describe the current picture of short-baseline neutrino disappearance, the flux constraint provided by SciBooNE, and the status of the joint MiniBooNE-SciBooNE analysis.

The formation of nanopollutants in the atmosphere, raindrops in a cloud, and cosmic dust share a common physics, closely related to the nucleation of phase transitions. Unfortunately the theory at hand does not reproduce laboratory measurements beyond the order-of magnitude level. The key unknown is the physics and behavior of nanoclusters that are far more complex than a single molecule, yet not big enough to be considered a solid (or liquid). In this talk I will focus on cosmic dust to introduce the theories of dust nucleation and formation. I will emphasize the major discrepancies between the model predictions and observations, underlying the need for a better understanding of the underlying physics. I will then discuss the various new ingredients that can be added to the theory to improve its performance and its ability to predict the properties and formation of nanoparticles. I will conclude by exploring the importance and ramifications of the knowledge that can be generated, ranging from everyday problems like rain and fog formation to the outstanding challenges of cosmology and climate change.