| | | Dr Neil Mañibo
~ Continuous Diffraction in Aperiodic Structures ~
Neil Mañibo talk was about his explorations into aperiodic diffraction theory. He began with a firm grounding in reality; one can physically shine a laser beam on an aperiodic tiling that has been printed on a glass slide at a suitable (small) scale and photograph the diffraction image that results. He presented how to mathematically think about such images. The crucial step is to derive a diffraction measure. Amazingly, this has a unique decomposition into three parts; spectra that are pure point, singular continuous or absolutely continuous. The discussion then focussed on how to tease out what part each of these pieces is physically contributing in a given diffraction image, all the while with an eye on establishing bridges with substitutions on words. The talk was masterful and uplifting; I'd love to be an undergraduate attending Neil's lectures. For readers wanting a concrete initial resource on this topic, there is an accessible paper by Michael Baake and Uwe Grimm from 2010, Surprises in Aperiodic Diffraction.
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