Talks

Deviations from a parity-symmetric Universe would strongly signal the presence of new physics beyond the Standard Model. The lowest-order scalar observable sensitive to parity in a homogeneous and isotropic Universe is the connected four-point function of a given cosmological field. Geometrically, this function is described by a suitable average of this field over many tetrahedral configurations. As the CMB represents a spherical projection of three-dimensional curvature fluctuations, its four-point function serves as a unique, but potentially limited, probe of this fundamental symmetry. In this talk, I will discuss progress in rigorously understanding the CMB’s sensitivity to parity-violating physics from both early- and late-time sources.

Compositions are fundamental to how we understand the world, but in the quantum realm, they reveal a deeper and more profound complexity. In composite quantum systems, intriguing phenomena such as Bell nonlocality, quantum entanglement, and quantum discord emerge—features entirely absent in classical systems. These nonclassical correlations are crucial for developing advanced information and communication protocols. In this talk, drawing from our recent works, I will explore foundational aspects of composition as they apply to quantum systems. I will also discuss new insights into the nonclassical correlations arising in these systems, and introduce a novel form of composition in the temporal domain, proposing it as a new primitive for information processing.
 

This talk will summarize our current thinking on the role of ocean-atmosphere coupling to intraseasonal oscillations including the Madden-Julian oscillation and its boreal summer counterpart. The importance of surface flux and SST variability for maintenance and propagation of intraseasonal oscillations will be examined, including insights derived from models. The issue of how coupling affects models simulations of intraseasonal variability will be examined, including whether it is mean state changes caused by the act of coupling versus the active role of coupling for improving the simulation of intraseasonal oscillations. Cross scale interactions between intraseasonal oscillations and other modes of coupled tropical variability will also be examined, including the Indian Ocean Dipole and El Nino-Southern Oscillation. An upcoming field program in the tropical Pacific to better understand some of these cross-scale interactions will also be highlighted.

Quantum resources have entered the many body stage over the last two decades. It is by now widely appreciated that entanglement plays a key role in characterizing physical phenomena, as diverse as topological order and critical behaviour. However, entanglement alone is not informative about state complexity, and in fact, it is only one side of the medal. In this talk, I will flip the coin and tackle quantum state complexity of many-body systems under the lense of non-stabilizerness - also known as magic. Magic quantifies the difficulty of realizing states in most error corrected codes, and is thus of fundamental practical importance. However, very little is known about its significance to many-body phenomena.

I will present method(s) to measure magic in tensor network simulations, and illustrate a series of applications to many body systems, including: (a) how state magic and long-range magic behave in conformal field theories - illustrating the limit of the former, and the capabilities of the latter; (b) how magic characterizes phases of lattice gauge theories, both in the context of spin liquids/error correction (toric code), and in the context of theories describing coupling between matter and light (Schwinger model); and (c) how our computational tools are presently more advanced than the largest scale experimental demonstration of magic in Rydberg atom quantum simulators.

Finally, I will discuss the broader impact of these findings on state complexity - indicating that realizing generic state quantum dynamics may require a very large amount of resources in error correcting quantum computers, but at the same time, providing interesting perspectives on new classes of variational states more powerful than tensor networks.
 

In this talk, I will focus on the ENSO-Monsoon teleconnection from the perspective of changes in moisture convergence. I will also speak about the performance of some models in capturing global teleconnection to monsoon, mainly when ensemble mean is performed. Finally, a new mode of the southern Pacific Ocean that affects ENSO evolution and global monsoon will be described.

Computing methods on classical computers have dominated the discovery frontline from fundamental physics for several decades now. It is however becoming clear that at least in physics, there are several computational avenues (such as finite density and real-time dynamics) where development can be accelerated via quantum computers. At the same time, improving classical computing techniques using clever analytical insights is essential to provide further inputs to the quantum computing frontier. In this talk, we will discuss the broad ideas behind the novel constructions and selected applications illustrating results for realistic systems in condensed matter and particle physics. Such scenarios are expected to be realized in quantum hardware in the recent future.
 

Certain natural geometric properties of electron wavefunctions in a crystal turn out to explain a vast range of experimentally relevant properties. The original example was the explanation of the integer quantum Hall effect by Thouless and co-workers in terms of the “Berry curvature” derived from Bloch states. We now understand that a kind of gauge field in the Brillouin zone is the key to many equilibrium and linear-response properties, and current work is seeking to generalize these results to nonlinear and non-equilibrium properties as well. This talk reviews the basic concepts of wavefunction geometry starting from basic notions of undergraduate quantum mechanics, then covers more recent applications to new topological states, with a particular focus on effects beyond the standard adiabatic limit.

Quantum error correction (QEC) plays a critical role in preventing information loss in quantum systems and provides a framework for reliable quantum computation. However, implementing protocols for QEC and fault tolerance remains a challenge in the current era of noisy, intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) processors. Here, we discuss recent progress in identifying resource-efficient strategies for QEC, which are tailored for the dominant noise processes affecting the quantum hardware. We show that such noise-adapted protocols can also provide a route to fault tolerance in near-term quantum devices, under certain assumptions.
 

Atomic and solid-state spin ensembles are promising platforms for implementing quantum technologies, but the unavoidable presence of noise imposes the needs for error correction. Typical quantum error correction (QEC) requires addressing specific qubits, but this is practically challenging in most realistic architectures. In this work, we propose QEC schemes for unresolvable spin ensembles. By using degenerate superpositions of excited states, which are fundamentally mixed, we find codes that can protect against both individual and collective errors, including dephasing, decay, and pumping. We show how information recovery can be achieved with only collective measurement and control, and illustrate its applications in extending memory lifetime. 

Ref: arXiv:2408.11628v1
 

We will discuss some aspects of my recent preprint, joint with Victor Ginzburg, on Kostant-Whittaker reduction, a (deformation) quantization of restriction to a Kostant slice. We will explain how this functor can be used to prove conjectures of Ben-Zvi and Gunningham on parabolic induction, as well as a convolution exactness conjecture of Braverman and Kazhdan in the D-module setting. While this talk will occasionally reference facts from a talk I gave at Perimeter on other aspects of this preprint, the overlap and references will be minimal.