Scientific Series

The cosmic microwave background contains a wealth of
information about cosmology as well as high energy physics. It tells
us about the composition and geometry of the universe, the properties
of neutrinos, dark matter, and even about the conditions in our
universe long before the cosmic microwave background was emitted.
After a brief review of what we may hope to learn from studies of the
cosmic microwave background about the early universe, I will review
measurements of the angular power spectrum of temperature
perturbations from the first 15.5 months of Planck data by the Planck
collaboration and by Renee Hlozek, David Spergel and myself. I will
then discuss the implications for the early universe of the recently
released Planck full mission data as well as the joint analysis
between BICEP/KeckArray and Planck.

In this talk I will describe recent work with Almheiri and Dong, where we proposed a connection between the emergence of bulk locality in AdS/CFT and the theory of quantum error correction. Bulk notions such as Bogoliubov transformations, location in the radial direction, and the holographic entropy bound all have natural CFT interpretations in the language of quantum error correction.  Time permitting, I will also discuss work in progress with Pastawski, Preskill, and Yoshida on a new class of stabilizer codes that explicitly realize many of the properties we argued the AdS/CFT error correcting code should have.  

I will describe a new collider object we have termed emerging jets.
These can arise when there is a confining dark sector connected to the
Standard Model by a TeV scale mediator, a scenario that is well
motivated by dark matter considerations. The signature of an emerging
jet is O(10) displaced vertices inside the jet each with different
impact parameter, and a small number of prompt tracks. I will describe
strategies that can be used to discover emerging jets even if they
have very small cross sections.

Holographic duality is a duality between gravitational systems and non-gravitational systems. In this talk, I will propose a different approach for understanding holographic duality named as the exact holographic mapping. The key idea of this approach can be summarized by two points: 1) The bulk theory and boundary theory are related by a unitary mapping in the Hilbert space. 2) Space-time geometry is determined by the structure of correlations and quantum entanglement in a quantum state. When applied to lattice systems, the holographic mapping is defined by a unitary tensor network. For free fermion boundary theories, I will discuss how different bulk geometries are obtained as dual theories of different boundary states. A particularly interesting case is the AdS black hole geometry and the interpretation of the interior of a black hole. We will also discuss dual geometries of topological states of matter.

I will describe a new proposal for defining the holographic
entanglement entropy at subleading orders in N (on the boundary) or
hbar (in the bulk). This involves a new concept of "quantum extremal
surfaces" defined as the surface which extremizes the sum of the area
and the bulk entanglement entropy. This conjecture reduces to
previous conjectures in suitable limits, and satisfies some nontrivial
consistency checks. Based on arXiv:1408.3203

From the general difficulty of simulating quantum systems using classical systems, and in particular the existence of an efficient quantum algorithm for factoring, it is likely that quantum computation is intrinsically more powerful than classical computation. At present, the best upper bound known for the power of quantum computation is that BQP is in AWPP, where AWPP is a classical complexity class (known to be included in PP, hence PSPACE). This work investigates limits on computational power that are imposed by simple physical, or information theoretic, principles. To this end, we define a circuit-based model of computation in a class of operationally-defined theories more general than quantum theory, and ask: what is the minimal set of physical assumptions under which the above inclusions still hold? We show that given only an assumption of tomographic locality (roughly, that multipartite states and transformations can be characterised by local measurements), efficient computations are contained in AWPP. This inclusion still holds even without assuming a basic notion of causality (where the notion is, roughly, that probabilities for outcomes cannot depend on future measurement choices). Then, following Aaronson, we extend the computational model by allowing post-selection on measurement outcomes. Aaronson showed that the corresponding quantum complexity class, PostBQP, is equal to PP. Given only the assumption of tomographic locality, the inclusion in PP still holds for post-selected computation in general theories. Hence in a world with post-selection, quantum theory is optimal for computation in the space of all operational theories. We then consider whether one can obtain relativised complexity results for general theories. It is not obvious how to define a sensible notion of a computational oracle in the general framework that reduces to the standard notion in the quantum case. Nevertheless, it is possible to define computation relative to a `classical oracle'. Then, we show there exists a classical oracle relative to which efficient computation in any theory satisfying the causality assumption does not include NP. This provides some degree of evidence that NP-complete problems cannot be solved efficiently in any theory satisfying tomographic locality and causality. Based on arXiv:1412.8671. Joint work with Jon Barrett.

Shape Dynamics is a theory of gravity which replaces relativity of simultaneity for spatial conformal invariance, maintaining the same degree of symmetry of General Relativity while avoiding some of its shortcomings.

In SD several kinds of singularities of GR become unphysical gauge artefacts, and the presence of a preferred notion of simultaneity fits better into the structure of quantum theory. In this talk I will outline the present status of research in SD on black holes and gravitational collapse, on the emergence of spacetime and on the first-order formulation of the theory.

The analogy between Multi-scale Entanglement Renormalization
Ansatz (MERA) and the spatial slice of three-dimensional anti-de
Sitter space (AdS3) has motivated a great interest in tensor networks
among holographers. I discuss a way to promote this analogy to a
rigorous, quantitative, and constructive relation. A key quantitative
ingredient is the way the strong subadditivity of entanglement entropy
is encoded in MERA and in a holographic spacetime. The upshot is that
the map between MERA and the spatial slice of AdS3 is mediated through
an additional integral transform. Interpreted directly, MERA is a
discretization not of the spatial slice of AdS3, but of the space of
geodesics on the spatial slice of AdS3.

We introduce and systematically study an expansive class of "orbifold Higgs" theories in which the weak scale is protected by accidental symmetries arising from the orbifold reduction of continuous symmetries. The protection mechanism eliminates quadratic sensitivity of the Higgs mass to higher scales at one loop (or more) and does not involve any new states charged under the Standard Model.

An exciting and largely unexplored frontier in observational and theoretical cosmology is to understand the properties of the universe between 400,000 years and one billion years after the big bang. Notably, the first galaxies formed in this time period, perhaps a few hundred million years after the big bang.  These galaxies strongly influenced the gas in their surroundings as well as the formation of subsequent generations of galaxies. The early galaxies emitted ultraviolet light and ionized "bubbles" of hydrogen gas around them.  These ionized bubbles grew, merged, and eventually filled the entire volume of the universe with ionized hydrogen in a process known as reionization. Understanding this process will constrain the properties of the first luminous sources, and fill in a significant gap in our story of structure formation, whereby the universe transitions from simple initial conditions to its present day complexity. I will briefly summarize current observational constraints and describe some new ideas for better determining when the reionization process completed using existing Lyman-alpha forest data.

As an alternative to the Holographic Renormalization procedure, we

introduce a regularization scheme for AdS gravity based on the addition

boundary terms which are a given polynomial of the extrinsic and 

intrinsic curvatures (Kounterterms).

Since these terms are closely related to either topological invariants 

or Chern-Simons densities in the corresponding dimension, they can be 

easily generalized to other gravity theories (Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet, 

Lovelock, etc.).

Finally, a general prescription on how to obtained the standard 

counterterm series in AdS gravity is given.​ 

The Higgs boson was discovered at the LHC more than two years ago.
So far, the LHC data is consistent with the Standard Model (SM)
predictions. Given its increased rate in the next run of the LHC
with a center-of-mass energy of 14 TeV, double Higgs production will
become an important channel in the search for deviations from the SM
due to new heavy particles. The study of double Higgs production is
also important for understanding the structure of the scalar potential.
In this talk, I will review the production mechanism of double Higgs
production in the SM and consider a model with an additional singlet scalar.
I'll discuss the size of the corrections to single and double Higgs production
in this model and the search for regions of parameter space where double
Higgs production is enhanced relative to the SM prediction.