Talks

I will discuss recent work engineering "semi-holographic" constructions of de Sitter space in string theory, using elliptic fibrations and orientifolds to uplift known Freund-Rubin compactifications. The dual brane construction is compact and provides a microscopic realization of the dS/dS correspondence of Alishahiha et al., realizing de Sitter space in d dimensions as a warped compactification down to d-1 dimensional de Sitter space coupled to a pair of large N matter sectors. This provides a parametric microscopic accounting of the Gibbons-Hawking entropy. I will discuss an explicit example in three dimensions as well as ongoing work in four dimensions.

Neutron star mergers represent one of the most promising sources of gravitational waves (GW), while that the presence of strong magnetic fields may offer the possibility of a characteristic electromagnetic signature allowing for concurrent detection. In this talk will be presented a new hybrid-passive approach to match the full GR-MHD evolutions of the binary neutron star mergers to the force-free equations in order to study numerically the dynamics and interaction of their magnetospheres.

Starting from AdS/CFT, one can introduce ingredients which produce cosmological solutions, including metastable de Sitter and its decay to FRW. In the de Sitter case, this produces a compact brane construction which mirrors the dS/dS correspondence realizing de Sitter as a pair of warped throats coupled to gravity. In the FRW case, I will present simple solutions sourced by magnetic flavor branes and explore their holographic description. The basic strategy is to exhibit a time-dependent warped metric on the solution and test the interpretation of the resulting region of gravitational redshift as a low energy effective field theory (EFT) by analyzing particle dynamics and correlation functions. At finite times, the EFT has a finite cutoff since system has a propagating lower dimensional graviton and a finite covariant entropy bound, but the graviton decouples at late times as the Planck mass goes off to infinity along with the entropy. This is work in collaboration with X. Dong, B. Horn, S. Matsuura, and G. Torroba. Along the way I will make some comments on the role of microscopic (UV complete) physics in cosmological holography and mention several different approaches to deriving landscape duals.

Gauge/gravity duality is our most complete construction of quantum gravity, but it gives in a simple way only the observations of an observer at the AdS boundary. I discuss various issues regarding the representation of the bulk physics.

Black hole-neutron star (BHNS) binary mergers areimportant gravitational wave sources and (possibly) gamma ray burst progenitors. Fully relativisticsimulations have only recently begun to try to capture neutron star physics beyond the polytrope approximation. In this talk we discuss the numerical challenges of replacing polytropes with realistic neutron stars--particularly those relating to sharper neutron star surface features and to the effects of neutrino radiation--and we present the current status of simulations by the (Caltech-Cornell-CITA-WSU) SXS collaboration and how they are dealing with these issues.

I'll discuss some recent insights regarding the complexity of simulating highly entangled quantum systems using classical and quantum computers, and what these advances might imply about the quantum state of the early universe.

Classical transition is one of the simplest consequences of cosmic bubble collisions. In quite a few simple toy model landscapes, collisions always result in classical transitions. Can it be generalized to the "real" string theory landscape? If so, does it imply some sort of hidden structure of the landscape?

In this talk, I explain how twistors can be used to provide a covariant UV cut-off for 4-D gauge theory. I'll then motivate the conjecture that the cut-off gauge theory automatically contains 4-D Einstein gravity. As evidence, I describe how the theory reproduces the gravitational MHV amplitudes.

The Einstein Toolkit Consortium is developing and supporting open software for relativistic astrophysics. Our aim is to provide the core computational tools that can enable new science, broaden the community, facilitate interdisciplinary research, and take advantage of emerging petascale computers and advanced cyberinfrastructure. The Einstein Toolkit currently consists of an open set of over 100 components for computational relativity along with associated tools for simulation management and visualization. The toolkit includes a vacuum spacetime solver, a relativistic hydrodynamics solver, along with components for initial data, analysis, and computational infrastructure. These components have been developed and improved over many years by many different contributors.