Scientific Series

For nearly the past century, the nature of dark matter in the Universe has puzzled astronomers and physicists. During the next decade, experiments will determine if a substantial amount of the dark matter is in the form of non-baryonic, Weakly-Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). In this talk I will discuss and interpret modern limits on WIMP dark matter from a variety of complementary methods. I will show that we are just now obtaining sensitivity to probe the parameter space of cosmologically-predicted WIMPs created during the earliest epoch in the Universe. I will discuss the science to extract from a positive signal in different experiments, and the prospects for an era of dark matter astrophysics.

It is well known that the ground state energy of many-particle Hamiltonians involving only 2- body interactions can be obtained using constrained optimizations over density matrices which arise from reducing an N-particle state. While determining which 2-particle density matrices are 'N-representable' is a computationally hard problem, all known extreme N-representable 2-particle reduced density matrices arise from a unique N-particle pre-image, satisfying a conjecture established in 1972. We present explicit counterexamples to this conjecture through giving Hamiltonians with 2-body interactions which have degenerate ground states that cannot be distinguished by any 2-body operator. We relate the existence of such counterexamples to quantum error correction codes and topologically ordered spin systems.

What lies beyond the Standard Model of particle physics? Are there very weakly interacting forms of matter and forces waiting to be discovered? In this talk I will describe some of the efforts underway to detect very weakly interacting particles, from dark matter to new forces. I will discuss recent observations and their theoretical significance as well as the connection to other experimental results. I will conclude with a short summary of the different frontiers and their interrelations.

Traditional condensed matter physics is based on two theories: symmetry breaking theory for phases and phase transitions, and Fermi liquid theory for metals. Mean-field theory is a powerful method to describe symmetry breaking phases and phase transitions by assuming the ground state wavefunctions for many-body systems can be approximately described by direct product states. The Fermi liquid theory is another powerful method to study electron systems by assuming that the ground state wavefunctions for the electrons can be approximately described by Slater determinants. From the encoding point of view, both methods only use a polynomial amount of information to approximately encode many-body ground state wavefunctions which contain an exponentially large amount of information. Moreover, another nice property of both approaches is that all the physical quantities (energy, correlation functions, etc.) can be efficiently calculated (polynomially hard). In this talk, I'll introduce a new class of states: (Grassmann-number) tensor-net states. These states only need polynomial amount of information to approximately encode many-body ground states. Many classes of states, such as Slater determinant states, projective states, string-net states and their generalizations, etc., are subclasses of (Grassmann-number) tensor-net states. However, calculating the physical quantities for these state can be exponentially hard in general. To solve this difficulty, we develop the Tensor-Entanglement Renormalization Group (TERG) method to efficiently calculate the physical quantities. We demonstrate our algorithm by studying several interesting boson/fermion models, including t-J model on a honeycomb lattice.

The availability of high precision observational data in cosmology means that it is possible to go beyond simple descriptions of cosmic inflation in which the expansion is driven by a single scalar field. One set of models of particular interest involve the Dirac-Born-Infeld (DBI) action, arising in string cosmology, in which the dynamics of the field are affected by a speed limit in a manner akin to special relativity. In this talk, I will introduce a scalar-tensor theory in which the matter component is a field with a DBI action. Transforming to the Einstein frame, I will explore the effect of the resulting coupling on the background dynamics of the fields and the first-order perturbations. The coupling forces the scalar field into the minimum of its effective potential, so the dynamics are determined by the DBI field, which has the interesting effect of increasing the number of efolds of inflation and decreasing the boost factor of the DBI field. Focusing on this case, I will show that the power spectrum of the primordial perturbations is determined by the behaviour of the perturbations of the modified DBI field and calculate the effect of varying the model parameters on the inflationary observables.

We show that ordinary and radiative muon capture impose stringent constraints on sterile neutrino properties. In particular, we consider a sterile neutrino with a mass between $40$ and $80~{\rm MeV}$ that has a large mixing with the muon neutrino and decays predominantly into a photon and light neutrinos due to a large transition magnetic moment. Such a model was suggested as a possible resolution to the puzzle presented by the results of the LSND, KARMEN, and MiniBooNE experiments. We find that the scenario with the radiative decay to massless neutrinos is ruled out by measurements of the radiative muon capture rates at TRIUMF in the relevant mass range by a factor of a few in the squared mixing angle. These constraints are complementary to those imposed by the process of electromagnetic upscattering and de-excitation of beam neutrinos inside the neutrino detectors induced by a large transition magnetic moment. The latter provide stringent constraints on the size of the transitional magnetic moment between muon, electron neutrinos and $N$. We also show that further extension of the model with another massive neutrino in the final state of the radiative decay may be used to bypass the constraints derived in this work.

Although the fact that a large fraction of the matter in the universe is non-baryonic is beyond doubt, the exact composition of the dark matter is still shrouded in mystery. Using ultra-sensitive detectors in the deep underground laboratories, physicists are attempting to directly detect dark matter particles streaming from space. At colliders, physicists hope to manufacture large numbers of dark matter particles and study their properties. I will first use an effective field theory approach to demonstrate the power of colliders by comparing these two approaches. I will then describe the recent efforts on measuring dark matter properties at colliders and how imminent discoveries may change our fundamental understanding of physics and the universe.

We consider one dimensional devices supporting a pair of Majorana bound states at their ends We firstly show [1] that edge Majorana bound modes allow for processes with an actual transfer of electronic material between well-separated points and provide an explicit computation of the tunnelling amplitude for this process. We then show [2] that these devices can produce remarkable Hanbury-Brown Twiss like interference effects between well separated Dirac fermions of pertinent energies: we find indeed that, at these energies, the simultaneous scattering of two incoming electrons or two incoming holes from the Majorana bound states leads exclusively to an electron-hole final state. This "anti-bunching" in electron-hole internal pseudospin space can be detected through a measure of current-current correlations. Finally, we show [2] that, by scattering appropriate spin polarized electrons from the Majorana bound states, one can engineer a non-local entangler of electronic spins useful for quantum information applications. [1] G. W. Semenoff and P. Sodano: J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. 40, 1479 (2007); [2] S. Bose and P. Sodano: “Non-local Handbury- Brown Twiss Interferometry & Entanglement Generation from Majorana

In terms of their energetics, cosmic ray protons are an insignificant by-product of star formation and super-massive black hole growth. However, due to their small mean free path, their coupling with the interstellar medium is absolute. In fact, they are most likely, the dominant source of momentum, and therefore kinetic force on galactic scales. By defining an Eddington Limit in Cosmic Rays, we show that the maximum photon luminosity of bright galaxies and quasars are capped by the production and subsequent expulsion of cosmic ray protons. Such simple arguments may explain why bright galaxies are faint in comparison to quasars and why super-massive black holes are relatively mass-less in comparison to galaxies.

How many interacting quantum (field) theories of four-dimensional geometry are there which have General Relativity as their classical limit? Some of us still harbour hopes that a quantum theory of gravity is "reasonably unique", i.e. characterized by a finite number of free parameters. One framework in which such universality may manifest itself is that of "Quantum Gravity from Causal Dynamical Triangulations (CDT)". I will summarize the rationale behind this nonperturbative formulation and CDT's main achievements in trying to explain the micro- and macro-structure of spacetime from first principles. This includes the remarkable property of "dynamical reduction" of the spacetime dimension from four to two at the Planck scale.

A new force mediated by a new vector boson with mass in the MeV to GeV range and with very weak coupling to ordinary matter appears naturally in many theoretical models and could also explain a variety of observed anomalies. Such anomalies include the discrepancy between the predicted and the experimentally observed value for the muon anomalous magnetic moment, and recent cosmic-ray data that can be explained by dark matter interacting through this force with ordinary matter. This talk will review the motivation for such a force and present a broad array of probes of this physics. These probes include high-luminosity e+e- colliders, such as BaBar and BELLE, whose existing data sets may contain thousands of spectacular events; new high-intensity fixed-target experiments at electron accelerators such as Jefferson Laboratory; and indirect astrophysical probes such as gamma-ray observations of Milky-Way dwarf satellite galaxies, which constitute some of the least luminous and most dark matter dominated galaxies known.

ABJM theory is a world-volume theory for an arbitrary number of M2-branes. One of the unique features of ABJM theory is its characteristic scaling behaviour, exhibited for example by the free energy and correlation functions of chiral primary operators. In more detail, ABJM theory has a holographic dual where thermodynamics at strong coupling is determined by a system of black M2-branes. The zero-coupling (black-body radiation) free energy disagrees with the strong coupling result. Even the scaling in the 't Hooft coupling is different (strongly suppressed at strong coupling). It is therefore important to check that the weak and strong coupling results converge as loop corrections are taken into account. The leading order computation indeed confirms that the first correction goes in the right direction.