Scientific Series

We study the boundary conditions in the topologically twisted Chern-Simons matter theories with the Lie 3-algebraic structure. We find that the supersymmetric boundary conditions and the gauge invariant boundary conditions can be unified as the complexified gauge invariant boundary conditions which lead to the supergroup WZW models. We examine the BPS indices of the supergroup WZW models which may describe certain junctions of M2-branes and M5-branes by identifying the vacuum configurations of the brane system with the weight diagrams of the associated Lie superalgebras. For the case arising from the BLG model an explicit expression can be given in terms of a mock modular form. We will also consider the alternative matrix quantum mechanical descriptions of the supergroup WZW models. The talk will be based on recent works arXiv:1512.06646, arXiv:1612.07565 and ongoing research.

Fast Radio Bursts are mysterious radio flashes that appear to have extragalactic origin. The inferred isotropic brightness temperature for these events can exceed 10^34 K. Discovered in 2006, only about 25 have been reported to date. I will give a short summary of the these events then explain how a new generation of dense radio arrays will dramatically improve our understanding of these burst. The HIRAX telescope in South Africa will detect about 10 FRBs per day and will localize these events with sub-arcsecond precision. A next generation of packed array could detect one every minute, allowing tomography of the ionized universe.

The notion of singular support for coherent sheaves was introduced by Arinkin and Gaitsgory in order to carefully state the geometric Langlands conjecture.  This is a conjectural equivalence of categories of sheaves on certain moduli spaces: in order to make the conjecture reasonable one needs to restrict to sheaves which satisfy a certain "singular support condition".  In this talk I'll explain how to think about this singular support condition from the point of view of boundary conditions in twisted N=4 gauge theory.  Specifically, Arinkin and Gaitsgory's singular support condition arises by considering only those boundary conditions which are compatible with a natural choice of vacuum state.  By allowing this vacuum state to move away from this natural choice we see aspects of a rich additional structure for the geometric Langlands correspondence.  This work is joint with Philsang Yoo.

Any quantum field theory can be thought of as arising from a perturbed UV conformal field theory, suggesting that information about the full RG flow is encoded in the original CFT. I will discuss ongoing work developing new methods for extracting this information to study strongly-coupled IR dynamics. This method uses a UV basis of conformal Casimir eigenstates to construct the Hamiltonian, which is then truncated at some maximum Casimir eigenvalue and diagonalized to approximate the low energy spectrum of the IR theory. After presenting a general framework which can be applied to CFTs in any number of dimensions, I will then focus on the specific example of scalar field theory, which can be used to study strongly-coupled systems like the 2D and 3D Ising models. Finally, I will discuss the possible application of this framework to gauge theories, including QCD.

I will discuss the role(s) of the Immirzi parameter in Loop Quantum Gravity, insisting on the Poisson algebra formed by Thiemann's complexifier, the volume and the Hamiltonian constraint. In particular, we will see how loop quantum cosmology is a direct quantization of this CVH Poisson algebra and how cosmological evolution amounts to a flow in the Immirzi parameter.

I will first show that a number of persistent astrophysical puzzles, including missing pulsars in the galactic center, fast radio bursts, the abundance of r-process elements, and the type Ia supernova progenitor problem, may all be an emerging signature of dark matter. I will address some theoretical implications and new astrophysical phenomena -- for example "quiet kilonovae" and "r-process donuts" -- associated with this dark matter. Then, I will describe a newly discovered effect, that dark matter crashing into neutron stars warms them to infrared temperatures detectable with the Thirty Meter, European Extremely Large, and James Webb Space telescopes.

Gravitational lensing is one of the primary investigation tools of all current and future wide field surveys. In this talk I will review its current status (with the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS)) and show what unique cosmological information it gives us. Lensing is not limited to a, low redshift, dark universe probe, it can also be used as a tool to probe baryons and nicely work in synergy with baryonic probes (e.g. CMB, Xray, tSZ, HI). I will show some of the work in progress to help constraining Active Galactic Nuclei feedback

Dark matter is all around us, however its particle physics nature is still mysterious. Searches for dark matter have largely focused on candidates with weak scale interactions to the standard model particles, the so-called WIMP paradigm. However, the parameter space of the WIMP paradigm is becoming increasingly constrained by both the LHC and direct detection experiments. Another possibility that is well motivated both theoretically and observationally is to have a dark sector connected with the visible one via a mediator whose coupling to the visible one is tiny. In this talk, based on my own work, I will discuss models in this direction and how to search for signals from the dark sector using various experiments including particle accelerators, dark matter direct detection experiments, cosmic ray experiments, and cosmic microwave background observation. 

How can we quantify the entanglement between subsystems when we only have access to incomplete information about them and their environment?‎ Existing approaches (such as Rényi entropies) can only detect the short-range entanglement across a boundary between a subsystem and its surroundings, and then only if the whole system is pure. These methods cannot detect the long-range entanglement between two subsystems embedded in a larger system. There is a natural choice of entanglement measure for this situation, called the entanglement negativity, which can do this and cope with mixed states as well. However it is defined in terms of the full density matrix, which we generally won't have access to.

I will begin this talk with a brief overview ‎of some replica trick-based eigenspectrum reconstruction methods, and their various strengths and limitations. Then I will show how to modify these to find the moments of the partially transposed density matrix. Once those numbers have been obtained, it is possible to modify the earlier eigenspectrum reconstruction methods to obtain lower and upper bounds for the entanglement negativity.

Addendum: An audience member pointed out that the adjective "quasi-topological" already has a meaning and it's something different from the subject of this talk. So with hindsight it should have been called `quasi-conformal quantum computing'

We will discuss some expectations regarding properties of N=1 SCFTs in four dimensions obtained by compactifying (1,0) theories in six dimensions on a Riemann surface. We will illustrate in detail how these properties come about in the special case of compactifications of two M5 branes probing Z_2 singularity.  In particular, we will obtain a large class of strongly coupled  N=1 theories in four dimensions obtained in such compactifications. We will derive some of their robust properties, such as anomalies and supersymmetric indices.

In the framework of the ordinary seesaw model with right-handed neutrinos (and nothing else) we show that the total lepton number violating decay of the Higgs doublet into a right-handed neutrino and a standard model lepton can successfully account for the baryon asymmetry of the Universe. This is possible thanks to thermal effects shortly before the sphalerons decouple.