This Week at ICTP

ICTP is excited to announce two colloquia taking place this week in its Budinich Lecture Hall, honouring the work of affiliated scientists and scientific communities.

On Tuesday 2 April at 16:30, ICTP will host Eliezer Rabinovici and his colloquium on SESAME: a Source of Light in the Middle East. The Synchrotron-Light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East (SESAME), is a cooperative intergovernmental organization by scientists in the Middle East. Its eight members include Cyprus, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Pakistan, the Palestenian Authority, and Turkey. SESAME is modeled after the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and uses a Synchrotron Light source in their research. Located in Jordan, SESAME strives to use science as a common language within their diverse community.

The Joe Polchinski Memorial Lecture will take place on 4 April at 16:30. Polchinski was a professor at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and received ICTP's Dirac Medal in 2008, shared with Juan Maldacena and Cumrun Vafa for their contributions in string theory. In 2007 he was awarded the American Physical Sociey’s Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics.

The memorial lecture, titled “A Brief History of Branes”, will cover Polchinski’s work concerning supermembranes, T-Duality, and his discovery of D-branes. The lecture will be given by Professor Paul Townsend from the University of Cambridge, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, UK.

Both colloquia will be livestreamed on the ICTP website and are open to all.