Bulletin of the American Physical Society
2006 APS March Meeting
Monday–Friday, March 13–17, 2006; Baltimore, MD
Session F50: Emerging Emergent Phenomena |
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Sponsoring Units: DCMP Chair: Leo Kadanoff, University of Chicago Room: Marriot Waterfront Hotel Grand Salons V-VI |
Monday, March 13, 2006 8:00PM - 8:36PM |
F50.00001: Emergent Phenomena In Particle Physics Invited Speaker: I will give a brief survey of the extent to which the notion of emergent phenomena is important in different areas of particle physics. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, March 13, 2006 8:36PM - 9:12PM |
F50.00002: Revisiting Mendel and the Paradox of Gene Restoration Invited Speaker: According to the laws of classical Mendelian genetics, genetic information contained in the nuclear genome is stably inherited and is transmitted from one generation to the next in a predictable manner. Several exceptions to the principle of stable inheritance are known but all represent specialized cases where the mechanisms have been relatively well defined. We have recently demonstrated that \textit{Arabidopsis} plants can inherit specific DNA sequence information that was not present in the chromosomal genome of their parents. This process appears to occur throughout the nuclear genome. Based on our findings we propose that this process represents a completely novel and hitherto unknown mechanism for the maintenance and inheritance of DNA sequence information. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, March 13, 2006 9:12PM - 9:48PM |
F50.00003: Statistical Mechanics of Complex Networks: From the Internet to Cell Biology Invited Speaker: Networks with complex topology describe systems as diverse as the cell, the World Wide Web or the society. In the past few years we have learned that their evolution is driven by self-organizing processes that are governed by simple but generic scaling laws, leading to the emergence of a vibrant interdisciplinary field that uses the tools of statistical physics to explain the origin and the dynamics of real networks. One of the most surprising finding is that despite their apparent differences, cells and complex man-made networks, such as the Internet or the World Wide Web, and many communication networks share the same large-scale topology, each having a scale-free structure. I will show that the scale-free topology of these complex webs have important consequences on their robustness against failures and attacks, with implications on drug design, the Internet's ability to survive attacks and failures, and our ability to understand the functional role of genes. \newline \newline For further information and papers, see http://www.nd.edu/$\sim$networks [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, March 13, 2006 9:48PM - 10:24PM |
F50.00004: Condensed Matter Physics and the Nature of Dark Matter in the Universe Invited Speaker: The nature of dark matter, which may be 6 times more abundant than ordinary matter in the universe and make up a quarter of the energy density, remains a profound mystery. A leading hypothesis is that dark matter is made of Weakly Interactive Massive Particles (WIMPs), which may result from supersymmetry or additional spatial dimensions. If these WIMPs exist, we should be able to observe their elastic scattering on suitable targets, provided that we can recognize the nuclear recoils they are expected to produce among a background of electron recoils. Expected event rates are small (a few events /kg per year) and the energy deposition should be of the order of 15 keV. I will explain how we are trying to harness condensed matter physics at low temperature (physics of charge carriers, athermal phonons, quasiparticles in superconductors) to detect such events. Such efforts are currently led by our Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS II) experiment, which is currently ten times more sensitive than any other WIMP search in the world and we hope to obtain another factor ten in the coming two years. This effort is squarely at the intersection of condensed matter, low temperature physics, cosmology and particle physics and provide a good testimony of the Unity of Physics. CDMS II is supported by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. [Preview Abstract] |
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