Research News

Salvatore Torquato, past Member in the School of Natural Sciences, and his IAS collaborator Oliver Philcox have applied methodologies from materials science in a cosmological context, providing new insights into the fundamental structure of the universe. Their work is now published in Physical Review X.

A research team, led by current Visitor Roman Rafikov, has developed a technique to study planet formation in other solar systems. By analyzing the vortices that form within discs of gas and dust around young stars, limits can be placed on the mass and age of planets of various sizes.

"A mathematician who went from obscurity to luminary status in 2013 for cracking a century-old question about prime numbers now claims to have solved another. The problem is similar to—but distinct from—the Riemann hypothesis, which is considered one of the most important problems in mathematics."

Neutron stars are one of the densest objects found anywhere in the Universe. Scientists still do not understand what exactly they are made from. A new piece of the puzzle, constraining the range of possibilities, has been discovered by a pair of scholars at IAS.

Not everything needs to be seen to be believed; certain things are more readily heard, like a train approaching its station. In a recent paper, published in Physical Review Letters, researchers have put their ears to the rail, discovering a new...

"Widely separated binary systems take more than a thousand years to complete a single orbit, making it challenging to measure the eccentricity of an individual system. Instead, Hsiang-Chih Hwang (Institute for Advanced Study) used a statistical technique to study nearly a million binary systems at once."

"Last July, two mathematicians from Durham University, Will Hide and Michael Magee, confirmed the existence of a much sought-after sequence of surfaces: each more complicated than the last, ultimately becoming so intricately connected with themselves that they nearly reach the limits of what’s possible."

"If an adversary gives you a machine learning model and secretly plants a malicious backdoor in it, what are the chances that you can discover it? Very little, according to a new paper by researchers at UC Berkeley, MIT, and the Institute for Advanced Study."

Update (06/17/2022): This research is now published in Astrophysical Journal Letters and can be accessed here.

Looks can be deceiving. The light from an incandescent bulb seems steady, but it flickers 120 times per second. Because the brain only perceives an average of the information it receives, this flickering is blurred and the perception of constant illumination is a mere illusion.

"For nearly two centuries, all kinds of researchers interested in how fluids flow have turned to the Navier-Stokes equations. But mathematicians still harbor basic questions about them. Foremost among them: How well do the equations adhere to reality?"