Talks

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.

Primodial magnetic fields are a potentially interesting origin for cosmic magnetism. Such fields can leave an interesting signal not only in the CMB temperature and polarization, but in structure at low redshift, contributing to the matter power spectrum and SZ effect at small scales. I will talk about the reasons for considering primordial fields, their origin and evolution, and how their observational consequences constrain their nature.

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.