Talks

The top quark is the heaviest known type of quark, and possibly the last. Particle physicists sometimes refer to it as the "truth” quark, not always with tongue in cheek. The top quark might be just an ordinary quark, no stranger than the "strange" one, but it might hold the key to major questions of Nature through its connection to the origin of mass, the Higgs boson, and cosmic dark matter. At the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago, hundreds of these heavy quarks have been observed and some first snapshots of their behavior have been obtained. At the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, millions of the heavy quarks will be produced. This lecture will review current knowledge of the top quark and explain how this knowledge has been obtained through experiments at the giant particle accelerators. Future experiments, which might reveal the top quark's deeper mysteries, will also be described.

It is a prime interest to understand gravitational physics and to develop cosmological applications exploiting the next generation of surveys, scheduled to be launched in the near future, such as SDSS3, DES, XCS, JDEM or EUCLID. The future precision surveys are promising to resolve outstanding problems in modern physics. With the level of precision available in future surveys, we can use the high resolution maps expected to be gained from next-generation surveys to test the foundations of gravity and particle physics. The gravity known to us at solar system scales (GR: general relativity) is possibly challenged at cosmological scales. The measured cosmic acceleration that we have ascribed to the presence of dark energy (DE) could be a signal that GR is broken in some way.

I will describe a new connection between supersymmetry, geometry and computer science. An exploration of the equations of supersymmetry has revealed a geometrical sub-structure whose classification depends on self-dual error correcting codes.

The BCFW recursion relations define Yang-Mills and gravity amplitudes in terms of lower-point amplitudes. I will discuss several connections between the internal consistency of this recursive definition and the allowed interactions of massless, higher-spin particles.

Although the observational evidence for cosmological inflation is growing, the physical mechanism behind it is still unknown. In part this is because inflation probably occurred at energy scales many orders of magnitude higher than that at man-made or astrophysical particle accelerators. So how can we learn about inflation? How does it constrain microphysical theory? One approach to answering these questions is primarily theoretical: attempting to embed inflation in fundamental theories of quantum gravity, such as string theory. Another approach is primarily observational: looking for signatures left by light fields that existed during inflation, such as isocurvature fluctuations from the QCD-axion. In this talk I discuss work on these two approaches.