IIP News 05

news
INTERNATIONAL
INSTITUTE OF
PHYSICS
Natal,
August 2017
Year II Number 05
2017 Abrikosov Award

Photo by Cyro Lucas Souza
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IIP News - Year II, number 05
Professors Johann W. Blatter, Valerii M. Vinokur and Vadim B. Geshkenbein
IIP-UFRN hosts the 2017
Abrikosov Award
In a special night at the IIP auditorium, the 2017
Abrikosov Award ceremony was hosted during
the “XVI International Workshop
on Vortex Matter”. This year professors
Johann W. Blatter, Valerii
M. Vinokur, Mikhail V. Feigel’man
and Vadim B. Geshkenbein received
the award for their contributions
to the research on vortex
Matter.
The prize is awarded every two
years to physicists who have
demonstrated outstanding
achievements in the field of vortex
behavior. The award was first
given in 2011 in honor of the
2003 Nobel Prize laureate, Professor
Alexei A. Abrikosov, whose pioneer work has
contributed to the development of the theory of
superconductors and superfluids.
Professor Mikhail V. Feigel’man
Professor Abrikosov passed way this year at the
age of 89.
XVI International Workshop on
Vortex Matter
The International Workshop in
Vortex Matter gathered world
leading scientists in vortex physics
to address aspects of vortex
matter ranging from bulk to mesoscopic
superconductivity in
new and traditional compounds
as well as in superfluidity.
This annual event regards vortex
physics as an unfolding field of
research. Therefore it is committed to include
the discussion of the most recent discoveries in
superconductivity and superfluidity. Recently superconductivity
was discovered in sulfur hydride

August, 2017 3
under pressure, which is far beyond previously
believed limits of critical temperature for conventional
superconductivity.
“We made a big effort to bring students and PhD’s
who have acquired their degree recently. We have
people from Europe and South America, especially
Brazil. This is a unique opportunity for those students
to have direct contact with exponent leaders
from the areas they are starting to work with”,
said Professor Wilson Ortiz, one of the event directors.
The first edition of the Workshop on Vortex Matter
was held in 1994, in France, and since then it
has been given significant contributions to the development
of physics.
Alexei Abrikosov
Alexei Alexeevich Abrikosov was born
in 1928, in the USSR (Now Russia). He
was the son of physicists Prof. Alexei Ivanovich
Abrikosov and Dr. Fani Abrikosova.
In 1948 the young Alexei graduated
from Moscow State University and started
working in the Institute for Physical
Problems of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where he
received his Ph.D. in 1951 for the theory of thermal diffusion
in plasmas, and then his Doctor of Physical and
Mathematical Sciences degree in 1955.
In 1991, Professor Abrikosov started working at the Argonne
National Laboratory in the United States, where he
became a Distinguished Scientist at the Condensed Matter
Theory Group in Argonne’s Materials Science Division.
Different prizes were awarded to him during his career, including
the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics, for his pioneering
contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids.
His theory predicted that in the alloys, a lattice
of tunnels, or vortices, could form in the superconductor,
with the magnetic fields passing through them, like ropes
pushed through the holes of Swiss cheese. The material
around the vortices remains superconducting.
Professor Abrikosov passed away last April, at his home in
the USA at the age of 89 years old.

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IIP News - Year II, number 05
Interview with Prof. Marcia Barbosa
Winner of the 2013 L’Oréal-UNESCO for Women in Science Awards, Professor Marcia Barbosa (UFRGS-
Brazil) visited the IIP for a lecture about the special properties that water possesses. During her
stay she talked with the IIP news about several topics, such as quantum analysis of water and the
role of women in modern science.
IIP - One of your lectures is called “The weirdness of Water”.
What is so weird about it?
MB - Water is a fascinating liquid because we depend on it for
our life. Nowadays we are looking for life out of the earth and the
way to look for that is to find where there is ice, because under it
may have liquid water and by having liquid water we may have
life based on carbon, which is the type that we know. So that’s
just an interesting thing and life as we know it, based on carbon,
depends fundamentally on water. Another water anomaly.
Today there are 74 anomalies, but every time I say a number,
then I’ll look in the next day and I find a new anomaly. These
anomalies are behaviors in which water differs from other
materials.
And why doesn’t anybody find this strange? If water is so different
why do people find it the most natural thing in the world?
Because it is abundant. Even my mother, when I say I study water
she says, “Oh what a common thing. Why do you study such a
common thing and not something more interesting? “
People think that water is a trivial thing because it is in our midst.
So trivial that we look at the anomalies as if that were right.
Ice floats in water, everyone sees it at home, but what other
material does the solid phase float in the liquid phase? None. In
other materials this does not happen, but the other materials are
not in our kitchen.
So I’m fascinated by the oddities of water. Since it’s got 74 of
these, there is way for us to spend the rest of our lives studying it.
It’s endless. Water is an “Alice in Wonderland”.
IIP - Which one of these oddities do you think is the weirdest?
MB - I have my favorites. Let’s just say that. I’ll say something old
and something new. The heat capacity of water being high is an
old thing. What does it mean? It means that it has to receive a
high temperature for it to raise 1 degree. But everybody knows
this.
When you go to the beach here in Natal, on a hot day like today,
the sand, that is silica, is hot but the sea is not so hot. Part of this
is because the ocean is huge, but another part of it is because
the water temperature absorbs lots of heat in order to rise a little
temperature.
Photo by Juliano Lima Barreto
Professor Barbosa during lecture in the IIP
This is an everyday thing that we experience in the pool of our
house, or on the beach, etc. This is also very important to regulate
our bodies, since we are 70% water, as well as to regulate the
planet.
There is some more modern things too, for example, water has a
dynamic that is very difficult to measure. It moves oddly. It moves
faster at low temperatures, when it is denser, more compressed.
When you add more water particles they move faster, which is
counterintuitive. Transit slows down when there are more cars.
Water does not do the same thing. It moves faster when there
are more cars and that’s a more recent anomaly, because you
need more sophisticated experiments for that.
Note that this happens in regions where we say that the water
is stretched, that is, in negative pressure, and that it actually
happens in plants, to have liquid flow in a low temperature region.
This is a more recently observed thing that has a connection
with life and at the same time allows us to make connections by
thinking of making processes of mobility at lower temperatures
of means that are with water or with other materials.
IIP - Is graphene more efficient for desalination?
MB - Right now we are working with carbon nanotubes, we are
working with nanotubes of molybdenum, but you note that all
this is still for rich people. It is efficient, but effective for whom?
For those who can produce this in cheap way, get it? Graphene,
you do not find it in neighborhood store.
Graphene was originally produced with duck tape, but this is
a manual process. Imagine how many filters I would have to
produce and there are also additional problems. It is efficient to
separate salt water, but has issues with sea water. The sea does
not only have salt and water, it has a lot of macromolecules and
they love holes, for something called depletion, so you have to
think very carefully about the material to avoid depletion.
To avoid this we will have to change the filter. With what? I do not
know. This is still research. We have to understand what water
likes and what macromolecules do not like.
Do you see that is always question over question and is not
engineer question, because we are going to have to do some
treatments on these things to avoid not only salt but avoid these
macro things.
There is another line, which has no scale because the next
question is, “Is there a scale?” Can I make a scale so that the
production of the filter is possible for poor countries? Do you
have a scale? I do not know.
What if I have no sea nearby? I have to think of other
technologies. There are other technologies, some thinking of
picking up moisture from the air, for example, that are old but
also new things. Ancient because the Peruvian people could
collec water from the air by building big towers, which were a
super-hydrophilic, which means that it loves water and then they
used gravity to collect the water.
What super-hydrophilic materials can I produce to do the same
thing without having to make big towers?
So you have a lot of questions and we have to ask the question
“does it have scale? Even if it does not have a scale is it feasible
on a small scale to help a micro-region?”

August, 2017 5
Wind doesn’t have a scale, but we use it as an
energy source.
And all this needs to have an agreement. We
will not solve the problem in Brazil if we do not
solve the problems in other parts of the world, for
example. So we’re going to have an agreement
at some point and say, “let’s look at energy, food,
water globally.”
At the end of this year there will be a large world
scientific conference, organized by the academic
institutions, UNESCO and the UN, when we will
discuss water and energy. It will be in Jordan, a
proper place because that’s where things are
really difficult regarding water.
But it has a strong political component, which
unfortunately gets resolved only when things get
much worse. When you generate a total food
stress people will seek for a solution.
IIP - Do politicians understand the seriousness of
the issue?
MB - It depends. In Brazil this is not a problem because we have
lots of water, so people do not think there is a problem. In Europe
where there is not enough water to produce Europe’s own food
is not a problem either, because as they have technology they
exchange it for food. If people today closed the borders of Europe
it would not have how to produce the food they eat, because
there is no way how. You don’t have enough water. It’s a big
population, with little land, little water and a very high degree of
consumption. There is no way.
But no one feels the problem because Europe is rich. Where do
you feel it? Where you have poverty and that generates internal
quarrels. Water becomes a commodity. People who can, flee,
others die. Perhaps the fact of having so much migration now
to Europe will make people think more about the roots of the
problem. It may be because it is the natural reaction of people is
to say that the problems are others, “so get these others out of
here”, than try to solve the problem, but the problem is a world
problem. We will try to solve the problem of Africa, this lack of
food, water, infrastructure in Africa.
And we in Brazil are a long way from this, geographically, but
if you look at the map of the water stress, where there is more
water than you consume, Brazil would be the place to produce
the commute for others because is the country that has the most
balanced. There is Canada, but it’s all frozen and landless. We
would be the best option, but we are disorganized and we waste
it. More than worrying about the Amazon, people should worry
about being more efficient to feed more people, but still people
are not worried about it.
IIP - Why is that that women are still not in a bigger number in
science? Is this a Brazilian or world problem?
MB - Let me tell you a little story. In 1999 the International
Union for Pure and Applied Physics held a meeting and it was a
time that things were oscillating in physics. There was a room,
with about 50 or 60 people and the problem was “we have few
students. What are we going to do? “ There was a representative
from different physics societies, but they had no women.
Then the representative of Canada - always Canada who comes
up with these ideas - said, “Oh, why don’t we attract more
women?”. Note that the goal of attracting more women was
because they had few PhD students.
They formed this international committee to study the problem.
And I was on the committee. I think that at the time the president
of the SBF wanted to get rid of me harassing his patience (laughs)
so he sent me there.
Professor Barbosa at the L’óreal-UNESCO Women in Science Award
And then I said: “No, I’m not going to do any study. We’re going
to do a meeting here. We’re going to make a revolution. From
this we are going to make a great conference”. And then we had
a conference in Paris, where we gathered 75 countries to discuss
the gender issue.
We discussed career, family, etc. That generated good results
because these people suddenly realized that the problem
was having few women at the beginning, but that this small
percentage decreased throughout the career. This was an
Universal issue.
Then we began to identify the problem of reconciling marriage,
having to travel abroad and this for, a married person, who not
always can travel, is complicated. We saw a series of power
problems. These groups became connected, which helps you by
sharing experiences, and then they returned to their countries and
made policies.
From then on policies emerged for women in England so they
could return to their careers after leaving to have children. In the
USA there were many of things in affirmative actions. Obviously
for my great disappointment Brazil did nothing.
I opened every curriculum Lattes in Brazil and I started taking the
data and setting up studies showing the percentage.
At the same time I was very friendly with CNPq and we organized a
couple of conferences in Brazil. Then the women’s issues secretary,
Niceis Freire came help us and started putting together some
programs at CNPq, such as a special drafting project on women.
The bad news is that when you go to the research grants it is a
catastrophe. It falls along the road in all areas, including those
where women are already the majority, like medicine In the last
10 years the percentage of women has increased by 2%. It is very
little. You have to wait 100 years to reach equality. We can’t. We
have to do something.
Every day we suffer a situation of prejudice, or think that people
are less, that everyone will say “oh but that is just a mosquito
bite”. Now, if you have 200 mosquito bites a day you say, “I do not
want to stay in that place that has 200 mosquito bites a day. I’ll do
something else.”
There are lots of little everyday things that seem silly, but when
you start integrating it throughout your career, which starts when
you’re a student. My generation pretended not to hear this. We
used to naturalize this. The good news is that this new generation
is not taking that.

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IIP News - Year II, number 05
Physics and Biology of Proteins
From June 12 to 30 the IIP hosted the workshop
Physics and Biology of Proteins, an international
program that discussed new approaches to problems
protein folding related fields of research. Lead
researchers from different institutions were reunited
at the IIP to present their latest results and exchange
experiences.
“We had a great diversity of lectures, covering
from mathematical foundations to field theory and
particles. For us this is a unique chance to work
directly with colleagues from the physical-biological
area. Not only this, but we also had a phenomenal
variety of topics being discussed here”, said one of
the program director, Professor Vitor Leite (Sao Paulo
State University - Brazil).
For young researchers the event represented a
great opportunity to contact colleagues from other
institutions working in the same field and to establish
new collaborations. Brazilian student Leandro de
Oliveira Jr (UNESP, Sao Jose do Rio Preto), said that
the workshop allowed him to get to know other
researchers in the country and from overseas to
exchange ideas. “It sure was the high point of the
conference, since I got to know people from all over
the world and opened doors to work together with
them.
Apart from physicists and biologists, specialists from
other subjects also participated in the event, bringing
different perspectives to the discussions proposed in
the program.
According to Paul Whitford (Northwestern University
– USA) the conference offered space to exchange
ideas, specially with physicists, since most of the
meetings about this subject were mainly attended by
biologists. “It was a real nice conference. It brought
a lot of leading scientists together for a few days. I
know a lot of them thought it was fun to catch up and
do some good science”, said Whitford.
IX Brazilian Meeting on
Simulational Physics (BMSP)
comes to IIP in August
Today Brazil has a large community of researchers
who use computer simulations in
the development of their research projects.
In this context, the Brazilian Meeting on Simulational
Physics has been held since 1997,
bringing together researchers from Brazil and
abroad, working in the most diverse branches
of physics.
In 2017 the IIP hosted the IX Brazilian Meeting
on Simulational Physics (BMSP), an event that
celebrates the 20 th anniversary of the conference
and guest scientists specialized in computer
simulation in the most diverse areas of
physics, chemistry, biology and materials science,
to present the latest advances in methodology
and techniques applied to the study
of problems through computer simulations.
The event was hosted from August 21 to 25,
as an excellent opportunity to promote interaction
among scientists working in this area,
with the goal of advancing the methods and
techniques available today.

August, 2017
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Can you hear a black hole ringing?
By Dr. Fabio Novaes
IIP Post-doctoral researcher
Yes, by hearing gravitational waves generated during black hole collisions.
After the first detection of gravitational waves by LIGO international
collaboration in September, 2015, all eyes are drawn towards
the physics of black holes and binary coalescence. Three black hole
collisions have been detected so far and for sure there are more to
come. A large part of the gravitational wave analysis rely on numerical
and semi-analytic approaches. Therefore, it is desirable to obtain
a deeper understanding of the mathematical structures behind black
hole mergers and the resulting gravitational waves.
The evolution of a black hole merger is divided into three phases:
inspiral, merger and ringdown. First, we have a binary system of black holes, initially far apart.
That is the inspiral phase and can be well described by post-newtonian approximations. When
the black holes are close enough, roughly at a distance of the same order of their size, strong
gravitational effects come into play and can only be described by full general relativity. This
is a very difficult problem to tackle analytically, therefore the analysis rely on the proper way
to numerically integrate Einstein’s equations. This type of analysis generates waveforms from
general relativity (and potentially variants of GR) that can be matched with the LIGO detections.
After the two black holes merge, a final black hole is formed and rings down, i.e. its event
horizon relaxes via oscillations, and reaches a final stationary state. This ringdown phase can
be well described by linearized gravity and then it can be tackled analytically.
The resonant ringdown frequencies are called quasinormal modes. We can write linearized
equations for gravitational perturbations of the Kerr solution, describing a stationary black
hole with mass and angular momentum, and those simplify to second order ordinary differential
equations. The classification of these differential equations is known since the end of
the 19th century and its given in terms of the number and type of singular points (regular or
irregular), monodromies associated to these points (how the function changes around branch
points in the complex plane) and accessory parameters. The hypergeometric equation, for
example, which commonly appears in most physics textbooks, has 3 regular singular points, 3
monodromy parameters and no accessory parameter. This makes this function very tractable
analytically. However, for the Kerr black hole, we have confluent Heun equations, in which one
of these singular points is irregular. This type of equation is not so well studied as the hypergeometric.
The general formulation of scattering in these terms have been recently treated
in a 2013 paper by Castro et al. However, the Kerr quasinormal mode problem has not been
completely solved so far.
Recently, I have been working with prof. Marc Casals (CBPF-Brazil) on solving the problem of
finding quasinormal modes of the Kerr-de Sitter black hole, which is a black hole embedded in
an accelerating expanding universe. In this case, the relevant equation is Heun equation, with
4 singular points and one accessory parameter. Curiously, the solution of this problem comes
about on how we can write analytic expansions for the accessory parameter using conformal
field theory techniques. This gives a complete characterization of this problem and the next
step is to apply the same technique to the more realistic Kerr black hole. These quasinormal
modes can be detected on the tail of gravitational waves measured by LIGO and our work
sheds new light on how to treat these modes analytically.
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Next Schools & Workshops
IIP News - Year II, number 05
Next Conferences
Workshop Finite Systems in Nonequilibrium:
From Quantum Quench to the Formation of
Strong Correlations
September 10 to 30, 2017
Workshop Magnetic Fields in the Universe VI:
From Laboratory and Stars to the Primordial
Structures
October 16 to 20, 2017
Workshop LHC Chapter II: The Run for New
Physics
November 06 to 17, 2017
Seminars and Colloquia to come
September 01, 2017
Seminar “Gravitational self-force: orbital motion beyond geodesic approximation”
with Dr. Soichiro Isoyama;
September 15, 2017
Seminar “An accurate equivalence for non-linear cosmological power spectra with
dark energy”
with Dr. Luciano Casarini;
September 19, 2017
Colloquium “Nonlinear I-V Curve at a Quantum Critical Point Produced by Dissipation”
with Prof. Harold U. Baranger;
Contact us at press@iip.ufrn.br to receive news about our seminars and colloquia in your email.

August, 2017 9
IIP Photo Galery
IIP events in July and August
INTERNATIONAL
INSTITUTE OF
PHYSICS
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Contact us at:
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IIP News - Year II, number 05