Talks

The discovery of a Higgs like boson at LHC in 2012 was a development of fundamental importance in particle physics. With this newly discovered state included in theoretical predictions of scattering events,  the Standard Model can be extrapolated  to much higher experimental energies. This implies that a degree of scale separation will be present between the discovered particles of the Standard Model, and any new particles required to address the outstanding mysteries that the Standard Model leaves unanswered. As a result, interest in treating the Standard Model as a consistent Effective Field Theory (the SMEFT) has dramatically increased. This powerful theory is the state of the art in studying experimental results model independently, up to energies that LHC probes in a robust fashion experimentally. Rather remarkably, as interest in this theory has increased in recent years, a number of subtleties has also been discovered in the physics of the SMEFT.  In this talk, I will review this rapidly advancing area.

At the event horizon of a black hole, gravity reaches its most extreme behaviour. Studying the dynamics of event horizons is key to understand gravity in is ultra-strong field regime and investigate the most fundamental properties of black holes. Black hole collisions provide a unique scenario to observe event horizons in a highly distorted and violently changing regime, which leads to a vast collection of phenomena that has not yet been detected by Advanced LIGO and Virgo. In this talk I will discuss the imprint that these phenomena leave in the gravitational-wave emission of black hole collisions and what it can teach us about the properties of black hole horizons.

Applications of physics to geometry have deep historical roots going back at least to Archimedes, while recent decades have seen structures of classical and quantum gauge theory lead to enormous advances in the theory of three and four manifolds. Meanwhile, geometry provides conceptual tools for physics as foundational  as variational principles, the kinematics of spacetime, and the topological  classification of matter. This talk will describe some possibilities for bringing number theory, more specifically, *arithmetic geometry* into this interaction. After giving some examples of the suggestive interplay of  number theory and physics, I will speculate somewhat on how ideas of quantum field theory may elucidate some of the deepest and hardest problems of number theory, especially the effective Mordell conjecture and the Hasse-Weil conjecture.