Conférences, ateliers, séminaires et colloques

Conférences et ateliers

Perimeter’s conference and workshop series provides the ideal environment for new ideas and collaborations to flourish. Researchers based at Perimeter and from across Canada are invited to submit proposals for conferences in Perimeter’s nine research areas. Conferences for the year are chosen based on interest from the Perimeter community, as well as their cross-disciplinary, timely, and original nature.

In 2023/24, 15 conferences and workshops were held at Perimeter, bringing 1,087 scientists to the Institute to participate. Although remote attendance is not tracked, Perimeter continues to offer free virtual-only access for all conferences and workshops and makes all conference and workshop talks available via recording in a timely manner, usually within just a day or two. All recorded conference and workshop sessions are freely available to the international research community through PIRSA and SciVideos.

Perimeter Scholars International célèbre son 15e anniversaire

Fifteen years ago, Perimeter Institute and the University of Waterloo began a new collaboration: an innovative graduate program that would attract talented young minds from around the world. They called it Perimeter Scholars International (PSI), and it now has more than 400 graduates from 75 countries. This year, graduates and current PSI students gathered to celebrate the program’s 15th anniversary and set the stage for its next big innovation. Over the three-day event, attendees collaborated on a physics pitch competition, celebrated with past and current Perimeter directors, and attended the graduation ceremony of the latest PSI students. The program also formally announced its next big step: a two-year option that includes time dedicated to research in academia or internships with industry partners. This new initiative, piloted over the past few years, has been undertaken in partnership with the University of Waterloo and Mitacs. Neil Turok, Perimeter Director Emeritus, who first envisioned the program 15 years ago, puts it best: “PSI was an experiment. The outcome wasn’t guaranteed in any shape or form – that made it very exciting. I’m confident in saying this is the best course in theoretical physics in the world.”

It from Qbit collaboration celebrates eight years of progress

The phrase “it from qubit” is a shorthand for the idea that spacetime emerges from entanglement. From that idea comes a natural collaboration between quantum information and quantum gravity researchers to ask a new class of fundamental questions and find new ways of describing the physics of the universe. The It from Qubit collaboration, supported by the Simons Foundation, held its annual conference at Perimeter in August 2023, organized by Perimeter Director and collaboration co-investigator Robert Myers. The conference brought together 155 in-person participants, ranging from junior graduate students to senior faculty, with a further 589 people registered to attend the conference online. This was the final meeting of the It from Qubit collaboration and displayed the culmination of the progress made during the collaboration’s many years of activity. It was satisfying for senior researchers to see postdocs and graduate students from the first It from Qubit meeting, hosted by Perimeter in 2016, returning to share their research, many of them now faculty, including Perimeter Research Faculty member Alex May, who co-organized the conference this year. This conference helped solidify the existence of a community that mixes techniques from quantum information and string theory, ensuring that it persists into the future.

Closing remarks from this final installment of the It from Qubit collaboration were delivered by collaboration co-investigator and former Perimeter Scientific Advisory Committee member John Preskill.

A full list of conferences and workshops is below.

It from Qubit
July 31 to August 4, 2023

Graduate Student Conference
September 14-15, 2023

QPV 2023: Advances in Quantum Position Verification
September 18-23, 2023

Perimeter Institute – CITA Day
October 10-11, 2023

Puzzles in the Quantum Gravity Landscape
October 23-27, 2023

Perimeter / IVADO / Institut Courtois Quantum & AI Workshop
November 29-30, 2023

Dark Matter, First Light
February 26-28, 2024

Higher Categorical Tools for Quantum Phases of Matter
March 18-22, 2024

CHORD Collaboration Meeting
April 10-12, 2024

Foundations of Quantum Computational Advantage
April 30 to May 3, 2024

SciComm Collider 2
May 8-10, 2024

Physics of Quantum Information
May 28-31, 2024

PSI 15th Anniversary Reunion
June 18-20, 2024

50 Years of Horndeski Gravity
July 15-19, 2024

Celestial Holography Summer School
July 22-26, 2024

Conference Sponsorship

In addition to the conferences and workshops hosted at the Institute, Perimeter sponsors a number of conferences, workshops, and advanced schools held throughout Canada annually. These events raise the scientific profile of Canada and contribute to a lively and rich national physics ecosystem. In 2023/24, Perimeter sponsored 10 Canadian conferences and workshops and 1 international collaborative conference. A full list of conference sponsorships is below.

Women in Geometry
Hosted by University of British Columbia
September 24-29, 2023, in Banff, Alberta

HEPiX Autumn 2023 Workshop
Hosted by University of Victoria
October 16-20, 2023, in Victoria, British Columbia

Canadian Undergraduate Physics Conference
Hosted by University of Waterloo
October 26-29, 2023, in Waterloo, Ontario

Canadian Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics
Hosted by McGill University and University of Montreal
January 19-21, 2024, in Montreal, Quebec

Lake Louise Winter Institute 2024
Hosted by University of Alberta
February 18-23, 2024, in Lake Louise, Alberta

Triangular Cosmology Conference
Hosted by University of Edinburgh
April 19-21, 2024, in Edinburgh, Scotland

2SLGBTQ+ in STEM
Hosted by University of Regina
May 2-4, 2024, in Regina, Saskatchewan

McNamara@65
Hosted by University of Waterloo
May 24-25, 2024, in Waterloo, Ontario

Theory Canada 16
Hosted by University of Waterloo
May 27-30, 2024, in Waterloo, Ontario

CASCA 2024
Hosted by University of Toronto and York University
June 3-6, 2024, in Toronto, Ontario

Ontario Graduate Mathematics Conference
Hosted by University of Waterloo
June 7-9, 2024, in Waterloo, Ontario

Séminaires et colloques

Perimeter hosts annual seminar series across all nine research areas as well as a weekly colloquium during the academic year. Visiting scientists, resident researchers, and candidate postdoctoral and faculty recruits deliver seminars and colloquia on their latest research, presenting cutting-edge results and innovative new theories. All seminars and colloquia at Perimeter are available for all Perimeter residents to attend, either in person or virtually, with online options continuing to be offered to broaden reach and increase accessibility.

In 2023/24, Perimeter hosted 291 seminars and 26 colloquia. Perimeter’s speaker series aims to highlight the brightest minds in physics and to increase the representation of women across our seminar and colloquia programs. This year, 22 percent of Perimeter’s seminars and colloquia were given by women.

Seminars and colloquia are recorded using Perimeter’s state-of-the-art audiovisual equipment and, with few exceptions, promptly uploaded to PIRSA to be freely available to the wider scientific community. The PIRSA repository now includes 16,050 publicly available recordings, which were viewed 517,710 times in 2023/24 alone by viewers in 188 countries. Recorded talks on our PIRSA repository have become a valuable resource, particularly for those who are not based at major research centres, providing access to high-quality presentations on cutting-edge topics in theoretical physics.

With support from the Simons Foundation, Perimeter has partnered with other organizations around the world to create an international hub to expand on PIRSA: SciVideos. This repository contains the full PIRSA catalogue as well as videos from CERN (Switzerland), the Simons Institute for Theory of Computing (US) and SNOLAB (Canada), with an active effort to expand the number of partners. The total number of videos on the SciVideos platform has risen to 17,943 with 2,074 videos added in the past year, accessed from 97 countries around the world.