Talks

Euclidean quantum gravity approaches have a long history but suffer from a number of severe issues.  This gives a strong motivation to develop Lorentzian approaches. Spin foams constitute an important such approach, which incorporate a rigorously derived discrete area spectrum.  I will explain how this discrete area spectrum is connected to the appearance of an anomaly, which explains the significance of the Barbero-Immirzi parameter and forces an extension of the quantum configuration space, to also include torsion degrees of freedom. This can be understood as a defining characteristic of the spin foam approach, and provides a pathway to an (experimental) falsification.

All these features are captured in the recently constructive effective spin foam model, which is much more amenable to numerical calculations than previous models.  I will present numerical results that a) show that spin foams do impose the correct equations of motion b) highlight the influence of the anomaly and c) underline the difference to Euclidean quantum gravity.  I will close with an outlook on the features that can be studied with a truly Lorentzian model, e.g. topology change.

Models for black hole formation from stellar evolution predict the existence of a pair-instability supernova mass gap in the range ~50 to ~120 solar masses. The binary black holes of LIGO-Virgo's first two observing runs supported this prediction, showing evidence for a dearth of component black hole masses above 45 solar masses. Meanwhile, among the 30+ new observations from the third observing run, there are several black holes that appear to sit above the 45 solar mass limit. I will discuss how these unexpectedly massive black holes fit into our understanding of the binary black hole population. The data are consistent with several scenarios, including a mass distribution that evolves with redshift and the possibility that the most massive binary black hole, GW190521, straddles the mass gap, containing an intermediate-mass black hole heavier than 120 solar masses.

In this talk, I will review the recent advances in the understanding of intriguing infinite-dimensional symmetries that emerge at the boundary of asymptotically flat spacetime and in the vicinity of black hole horizons. These symmetries play an important role in the description of many phenomena such as gravitational memory effects and scattering amplitudes, and have paved the way to a holographic description of gravity in asymptotically flat spacetimes in terms of correlators on the celestial sphere.

We study the real-time dynamics of a small bubble of "false vacuum'' in a quantum spin chain near criticality, where the low-energy physics is described by a relativistic (1+1)-dimensional quantum field theory. Such a bubble can be thought of as a confined kink-antikink pair (a meson). We carefully construct bubbles so that particle production does not occur until the walls collide. To achieve this in the presence of strong correlations, we extend a Matrix Product State (MPS) ansatz for quasiparticle wavepackets [Van Damme et al., arXiv:1907.02474 (2019)] to the case of confined, topological quasiparticles. By choosing the wavepacket width and the bubble size appropriately, we avoid strong lattice effects and observe relativistic kink-antikink collisions. We use the MPS quasiparticle ansatz to identify scattering outcomes: In the Ising model, with transverse and longitudinal fields, we do not observe particle production despite nonintegrability (supporting recent numerical observations of nonthermalizing mesonic states). With additional interactions, we see production of confined and unconfined particle pairs. Although we simulated these low-energy, few-particle events with moderate resources, we observe significant growth of entanglement with energy and with the number of collisions, suggesting that increasing either will ultimately exhaust our methods. Quantum devices, in contrast, are not limited by entanglement production, and promise to allow us to go far beyond classical methods. We anticipate that kink-antikink scattering in 1+1 dimensions will be an instructive benchmark problem for relatively near-term quantum devices.

The talk will focus on the spectrum of near-extremal black holes in gravity and near-BPS black holes in supergravity. For concreteness, we will study cases in asymptotically four-dimensional flat space and three-dimensional Anti-de Sitter. This will be done by analyzing quantum effects near the horizon captured by an emergent Jackiw-Teitelboim mode at low temperatures. This will allow us to systematically study questions such as the extremal degeneracy and the size of the gap in the black hole spectrum, which can be compared to some string theory constructions.

Recent years new concepts of symmetries have been developed such as higher form symmetries, and categorical symmetries. The higher form symmetries can be either explicit in a Hamiltonian, or inexplicit as a dual of an ordinary symmetry. The behavior of higher form symmetries are easy to evaluate in phases with gaps. But at quantum criticalities their behaviors are more nontrivial. We evaluate the behaviors of higher form symmetries (either explicit or inexplicit) at various quantum critical points, and demonstrate that for many quantum critical points a universal logarithmic contribution arises, which is analogous to the quantum entanglement entropy. This logarithmic contribution is related to the universal conductance at the quantum critical points, and in some cases can be computed exactly using duality between CFTs developed in last few years. We also evaluate the behavior of categorical symmetries for more exotic cases with subsystem symmetries.

I will review the analysis of boundary symmetries in first order 3d gravity, and explain how the study of the boundary current algebra and the Sugawara construction actually leads to two dual notions of diffeomorphism charges. This provides a new understanding of the relationship between the second order and first order formulations, and of the existence of finite distance asymptotic symmetries (as strange as this sounds) in topological theories. This analysis is performed on the most general theory of first order 3d gravity, which also enables to understand the duality between curvature and torsion, as well as the relationship with chiral and massive gravity.

We construct, for the first time, the time-domain gravitational-wave strain waveform from the collapse of a strongly gravitating Abelian Higgs cosmic string loop in full general relativity. We show that the strain exhibits a large memory effect during merger, ending with a burst and characteristic ringdown as a black hole is formed. Furthermore, we investigate the waveform and energy emitted as a function of width, radius and string tension Gμ. We find that the mass normalized gravitational-wave energy displays a strong dependence on the inverse of the string tension E_GW / M_0 ∝ 1/Gμ, with E_GW / M_0 ∼ O(1)% at the percent level, for the regime where Gμ ~ 1e-3 . Conversely, we show that the efficiency is only weakly dependent on the initial string width and initial string radii. Using these results, we argue that gravitational wave production is dominated by kinematical instead of geometrical considerations.