High Energy Physics

While entanglement has been examined extensively in AdS/CFT, it has avoided significant attention in the study of celestial holography and asymptotic symmetries relevant to asymptotically flat spacetime. I will present work that considers the entanglement of a Milne patch for Maxwell theory in Minkowski spacetime from the perspective of celestial holography. In the Minkowski vacuum, we find that the Milne patch is thermally entangled. We interpret the thermal entangling operator that builds the Minkowski vacuum from the Milne vacuum as an interaction term in the celestial CFT. We further examine the edge modes of the Milne patch, assigning them a physical interpretation as fluctuations in Milne asymptotic charge. Interestingly, we find that the constraint governing these edge modes includes sources that avoid the Minkowski interior. Altogether, by studying entanglement along the extra holographic direction present in celestial holography but absent in AdS/CFT, our work bridges a critical gap between our understanding of entanglement in the latter and the physically relevant setting of asymptotically flat spacetime.

Zoom Link: TBD

The holographic duality between strongly coupled quantum field theories and weakly coupled gravitational theories in one higher dimension holds, in principle, the promise of understanding strongly coupled systems that occur in condensed matter physics, such as the "strange" metals that appear in materials such as high-Tc cuprates. Unfortunately, the holographic models of metals that have previously been studied have not been successful in capturing even the most basic physics that any realistic model of a metal should obey. In this talk, I will review the essential properties that any metal (strongly coupled or not) must satisfy, and propose a new holographic model that is consistent with these requirements. The new model is based on a radically different approach compared with previous holographic models of metals, and crucially relies on recent work that formulates in a precise way the conditions for an IR effective field theory to be "emergeable" from a UV theory at nonzero charge density. In particular, the holographic model I study is dual to a quantum field theory with a global symmetry group LU(1) -- the "loop group" whose elements are smooth functions from the circle into U(1). I present the results of a solution of the model and argue that its properties are qualitatively consistent with what one should expect to find in a strongly coupled metal.

Zoom Link: TBD

It has long been known in studies of Pion physics, non-linear sigma models and cosmology that thinking in terms of field space metrics can be useful. Such an approach can help identify and define field redefinition invariant physics in observables. This approach is reemerging recently an a key organizing principle and calculational tool for interpreting collider physics data to study Higgs properties. I will review some known results and discuss outstanding issues being worked on in this area. 

Zoom Link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/96662488113?pwd=cGs0THQwWXRkcm9pVzcwVytnNjZ5Zz09

For a theory whose half-BPS sector can be described by N=4 quiver quantum mechanics, its BPS algebra (à la Harvey-Moore) is given by the quiver Yangian. I will first review the construction of the BPS quiver Yangians and then discuss their applications, such as on BPS counting, Gauge/Bethe correspondence, and knot-quiver correspondence. 

Zoom Link: TBD

I review a class of quantum error correcting codes that directly takes into account the large-N aspects of holographic theories. I will discuss some aspects of the vacuum sector of these codes and use them to show the equivalence between two different approaches to entanglement wedge reconstruction.

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/96318197584?pwd=YXJEdkJrVktXVmI3SWVlRmlaK3A4Zz09

SNOLAB is a laboratory two kilometers underground in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. This laboratory boasts the lowest muon flux on Earth. This low muon flux is utilized for a variety of research on Quantum computing and the nature of dark matter, which are some of the highest priority research topics in fundamental and applied physics. New sensors are required for light dark matter searches that extend current capabilities by three orders of magnitude in energy. The required energy scales overlap with the energy scale of environmental disturbances that limit the coherence time of many candidate qubit systems, like superconducting circuits. I will give a short overview of SNOLAB. I will then focus on the requirements and alignment of light dark matter searches and cutting-edge qubit performance. Finally, I will say a few words on how future experiments can leverage these maturing quantum computing technologies for fundamental physics searches.

Zoom Link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/95345167872?pwd=eDhYREd2Q04yV21DUC84NnVEcHRmUT09

Universal properties of two-dimensional conformal interfaces are encoded by the flux of energy transmitted and reflected during a scattering process.

In this talk, I will develop a method that allows me to extend previous results based on thin-brane holographic models to smooth domain-wall solutions of 3-dimensional gravity.

As an application, I will compute the transmission coefficient of a Janus interface in terms of its deformation parameter.

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/98684574364?pwd=WGdrQXhRcHRJZUZMYmNObUVZT1ZCZz09

We construct two-dimensional quantum states associated to four-dimensional linearized rotating self-dual black holes in (2,2) signature Klein space. The states are comprised of global conformal primaries circulating on the celestial torus, the Kleinian analog of the celestial sphere. By introducing a generalized tower of Goldstone operators we identify the states as coherent exponentiations carrying an infinite tower of w1+inf charges or soft hair. We relate our results to recent approaches to black hole scattering, including a connection to Wilson lines, S-matrix results, and celestial holography in curved backgrounds.

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/94163164577?pwd=RHFVZU5XUEN0T3c3Zm1VR3VhZnNsZz09

Despite first observing cosmic rays with energies above an EeV (10^18 eV) in the 1960s, the source of these particles remains an open question. Modern observatories, in particular the Pierre Auger Observatory and Telescope Array, have firmly established that the cosmic ray spectrum continues up to ~10^20.3 eV and have significantly advanced our understanding of these particles. However, limited statistics, uncertainties in particle physics, and significant deflections in the Galactic magnetic field have made progress towards discovering their astrophysical source extremely challenging. One key astrophysical input needed to understand ultrahigh energy cosmic ray data is the distribution of their sources, or the source evolution. In this talk, I will focus on multimessenger observations which have the potential to pin down the source evolution for the very first time.

Zoom Link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/94054513261?pwd=aHRNWE04VDI2cDA2RmRYQmtNRnd3dz09

We develop the bulk geometric description of correlation functions of operators whose scaling dimensions are of order the central charge in AdS/CFT. We follow a bottom-up approach, discussing solutions to Einstein gravity that are closely related to familiar black holes in AdS. In order to reproduce the correct dependence of a conformal correlation function on the location of operator insertions, we must introduce a novel Gibbons-Hawking-York boundary term associated with the stretched horizon of each black hole. We discuss the bulk dual of two point functions in CFT’s living in arbitrary dimensions. Specializing to AdS3 allows us to discuss higher point functions, where we find that the dual geometries are sometimes multi-boundary wormholes, whose holographic interpretation has been the focus of much recent activity.

Zoom Link: TBD

Getting the strongest physics conclusions from collider particle physics experiments regarding the (in)consistency of the Standard Model with actual measurements requires Effective Field Theory techniques. This approach (known as the SMEFT) has been rapidly advanced in recent years, leading to new analyses of the data being executed by Atlas and CMS. The current state of the theoretical art is not precise enough as such EXP studies are continued into the future, as the measurements continue to become more precise. We need to be able to calculate more precisely in the SMEFT to keep up. After an intro to this area of research, I will discuss some recent calculations that have pushed things to the two loop level in precision for higgs production/decay in the SMEFT, and how thinking geometrically (in terms of field space connections and the resulting Higgs geometries) in EFT is the key to keep advancing the theoretical state of the art.

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/99931154202?pwd=SUMzK2JIS0prNk5KaGZWakphckZhdz09

I will construct a top-down example of celestial holography, based on recent work with Costello and Paquette. Our duality relates certain models of self-dual gauge theory and conformal gravity, placed on an asymptotically flat four dimensional spacetime called Burns space, to a two dimensional chiral algebra living on D1-branes in a topological string theory on twistor space.

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/92898535744?pwd=T2w2SUp0VnU5NWtPSm50VENvWlRYQT09