Talks

I will discuss the collider signatures of heavy, long-lived, neutral particles that decay to charged particles plus missing energy. The focus will be the case of a neutralino NLSP decaying to Z and gravitino within the context of General Gauge Mediation (based on arXiv:1006.4575). I will show that the LHC has the potential for early discovery of such a long-lived particle if its lifetime (c tau) is between about 0.1 millimeters and 100 meters. I will also discuss the use of timing and pointing measurements to fully reconstruct kinematics in events with displaced decays.

I discuss a model for particle acceleration in the current sheet separating the open and closed field line regions, and crossing the neutral line region, of a pulsar's magnetosphere, which has substantial kinship to the phenomena observed in planetary magnetospheres within the solar system. Possible applications to gamma ray emission from pulsars are also described.

We introduce a family of variational ansatz states for chains of anyons which optimally exploits the structure of the anyonic Hilbert space. This ansatz is the natural analog of the multi-scale entanglement renormalization ansatz for spin chains. In particular, it has the same interpretation as a coarse-graining procedure and is expected to accurately describe critical systems with algebraically decaying correlations. We numerically investigate the validity of this ansatz using the anyonic golden chain and its relatives as a testbed. This demonstrates the power of entanglement renormalization in a setting with non-abelian exchange statistics, extending previous work on qudits, bosons and fermions in two dimensions. This is joint work with Ersen Bilgin.

The AdS/CFT correspondence relates large-N, planar quantum gauge theories to string theory on the Anti-de-Sitter background. I will discuss exact results in field theories with AdS duals, which can be obtained with the help of diagram resummations, mapping to quantum spin chains and two-dimensional sigma-models.