The Virtues of Defects

For centuries, physicists have described how the universe functions based on observations of the natural world taken at a specific time and place. But increasingly, physicists have found that certain probes of the universe are not local to one place or time. Known as nonlocal observables or defects, these extend across regions of space-time of various dimensions and are ubiquitous in quantum mechanics and gravity.

The collaboration aims to find the nonlocal observables and hopes to capitalize on recent successes in the field led by some of its principal investigators, including breakthroughs in computational methods, advances in theories of defects that revealed new phases of quantum systems, and progress in gauge theory, which describes some of the fundamental forces in the universe.