Talks

In her December 2 Perimeter Public Lecture webcast, Hallberg will explore examples of emergent phenomena and demonstrate how we can tackle these problems using quantum information to filter the most relevant data. By advancing research in this field, we hope to seed advances with applications from medical equipment and new materials to efficient energy generation, transportation, and storage.

I will discuss challenges of quantum gravity, highlighting conceptual, methodological as well as phenomenological aspects. Focusing on asymptotically safe quantum gravity, I will review recent progress in addressing key theoretical challenges using continuum and lattice methods. Furthermore, I will explain how the high predictive power of the asymptotically safe fixed point for quantum gravity and matter might allow us to explain fundamental properties of our universe, for example its dimensionality. Finally, I will point out possible connections between different approaches to quantum gravity, and how these connections might help us formulating a fundamental description of nature.

In string compactifications the roles of physics and geometry are intrinsically intertwined. While the goals of these 4-dimensional effective theories are physical, the path to those answers frequently leads to cutting-edge challenges in modern mathematics. In this talk, I will describe recent progress in characterizing the geometry of Calabi-Yau manifolds in terms their description as elliptic fibrations. This description has remarkable consequences for the form of the string vacuum space and the properties of string effective theories, including particle masses and couplings.

I will review the numerical approach to testing gauge/gravity duality using matrix models. This will lead to a summary of recent results from the BFSS, BMN and Berkooz-Douglas matrix models and a strong non-perturbative test of gauge/gravity duality.

One of the puzzles that the newly data-rich fields of cosmology and astrophysics are most advantaged to tackle is the nature of the dark sector.  In particular, a dark sector that thermalizes with the SM bath at some epoch has present-day observable properties that are directly tied to early-universe interactions. In this talk I survey some recent work on detecting different types of thermal dark particles by leveraging different cosmological and astrophysical datasets.  I discuss the utility of each of these different probes, the implication for particle theories, and prospects for the future.