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The purpose of this seminar is to provide a casual environment for students, post-docs and faculty to gather and discuss their ongoing research in mathematical physics. Each week a participant will give a brief lecture about their problem and ideas, followed by discussion. This formatting should be especially useful for younger researchers, as it provides an opportunity to practice giving lectures and hear suggestions from experienced and varied minds.

First speaker: Lawrence Frolov

Title: Recent developments on the arrival time problem

Abstract: Consider a ``quantum particle' ' initially prepared inside some bounded region of physical space, and suppose detectors are placed along the boundary of that region. Starting from time zero, the particle freely evolves in the interior of the region until it is detected along the boundary, at which point the time and position of detection is recorded. The arrival time problem is to predict a probability distribution of the times at which the particle is detected. This question lies outside the reach of orthodox quantum mechanics, as time has no corresponding operator. Recently there's been controversy about the extent to which we must analyze the detector to predict arrival times. It has also led to speculation about whether arrival time experiments could be used for superluminal signaling. In this talk I will try to briefly provide an overview of the arguments being presented by both sides, explain why some arguments fall flatter than others, and discuss future avenues of research.