High Energy Physics

The Z2 orbifold of N=4 SYM can be connected to N=2 superconformal QCD by a marginal deformation. The spin chains in this marginal family of theories have sufficient symmetry that allows for an all-loop determination of dispersion relation of BMN magnons. The exact two body S matrix is also fixed up to an overall phase. The exact dispersion relation of the magnon can be obtained from the matrix model of lowest modes on S^3, as well. I'll also talk briefly about some progress made towards the string dual of N=2 superconformal QCD, the endpoint of the deformation.

In this talk I will discuss the applications of the gauge/gravity duality to the strongly coupled quark gluon plasma, focusing in particular on the role of the shear viscosity to entropy ratio. It has been argued that the lower bound on the shear viscosity to entropy density in strongly coupled plasmas can be understood in terms of microcausality violation in the dual gravitational description. However, since the transport properties of the system characterize its infrared dynamics, while the causality of the theory is determined by its ultraviolet behavior, the link between the viscosity bound and microcausality should not be applicable in theories that undergo low temperature phase transitions. I will discuss an explicit holographic model confirming this fact, in which there is a ``decoupling'' of UV from IR physics.

We discuss the coupling of fermions to holographic superconductors in 3+1 and 4+1 (bulk) dimensions. We do so from a top-down perspective, by considering the reduction of the fermionic sector in recently found consistent truncations of type IIB and D=11 supergravity on squashed Sasaki-Einstein manifolds, which notably retain a finite number of charged (massive) modes. The truncations in question also include the string/M-theory embeddings of various models which have been proposed to describe systems with non-relativistic scale invariance via holography. We show that the lower-dimensional effective action for the fermion modes includes certain interactions that had been discussed in bottom-up constructions, as well as a variety of new couplings that may be relevant for applications of holographic techniques to the study of condensed matter systems

The idea of an effective conformal theory describing the low-lying spectrum of the dilatation operator in a CFT is developed. Such an effective theory is useful when the spectrum contains a hierarchy in the dimension of operators, and a small parameter whose role is similar to that of 1/N in a large N gauge theory. These criteria insure that there is a regime where the dilatation operator is modified perturbatively. Global AdS is the natural framework for perturbations of the dilatation operator respecting conformal invariance, much as Minkowski space naturally describes Lorentz invariant perturbations of the Hamiltonian. Assuming that the lowest-dimension single-trace operator is a scalar, O, I consider the anomalous dimensions, gamma(n,l), of the double-trace operators of the form O (del^2)^n (del)^l O. Purely from the CFT, perturbative unitarity places a bound on these dimensions; non-renormalizable AdS interactions lead to violations of the bound at large values of n. I also consider the case that these interactions are generated by integrating out a heavy scalar field in AdS. The presence of the heavy field "unitarizes" the growth in the anomalous dimensions, and leads to a resonance-like behavior in gamma(n,l) when n is close to the dimension of the CFT operator dual to the heavy field. Finally, I demonstrate that bulk flat-space S-matrix elements can be extracted from the large n behavior of the anomalous dimensions. This leads to a direct connection between the spectrum of anomalous dimensions in d-dimensional CFTs and flat-space S-matrix elements in d+1 dimensions

CRESST is a cryogenic dark matter search located at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy. Scintillating CaWO4 crystals are operated as cryogenic calorimeters. The phonon (heat) signal measured with a tungten transition edge sensor on the surface of these crystals allows a precise determination of the energy deposited in the crystal, independent of the type of interaction. A light signal, simultaneously registered by a separate cryogenic detector, serves to identify the type of interaction. This phonon/light technique allows a discrimination of electron recoils induced by radioative backgrounds from the searched nuclear recoils with high efficiency ,and, to some extent, even to determine which type of nucleus was recoiling. I will present results from 564 kg-days of data of the presently still ongoing run, which reveal an unexpected excess of oxygen recoils. To shine some light on the nature of these events, I will discuss possible backgrounds in some detail.