Talks

In this talk I show how simple ideas motivated from the Swampland program, lead to concrete predictions for our universe.  These include predictions for particle physics and cosmology.  I also discuss some experimental predictions for these ideas.

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Correlation functions are ubiquitous in quantum field theory, but their use in quantum gravity beyond perturbative and asymptotically flat regimes has been limited, due to difficulties with diffeomorphism invariance and the dynamical nature of geometry. We address these challenges in the context of nonperturbative quantum gravity, motivated by the goal of computing geometric correlators from first principles, as a possible window to early-universe cosmology. I will report on recent work in 2D Lorentzian quantum gravity, formulated in terms of causal dynamical triangulations, which demonstrates the feasibility of constructing and measuring manifestly diffeomorphism-invariant curvature correlators. I will discuss some unusual features of the connected correlators and new results on their behaviour in two dimensions, obtained with the help of Monte Carlo simulations.

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With the recent construction of quantum low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes with optimal asymptotic parameters, finding methods to perform low-overhead computation using those constructions has become a central problem of quantum error-correction. In particular, triorthogonal codes---which admit transversal non-Clifford operations---are of particular interest, but few examples of these codes are presently known. In our work, we introduce a new family of codes, the quantum rainbow codes, a generalization of pin codes and color codes, that can be constructed from any chain complex. When applied to the hypergraph product of three complexes, we show that those codes can implement transversal non-Clifford gates and have improved parameters compared to pin codes. Considering expander graphs with large girth as the input complexes, we can for instance obtain families of triorthogonal codes with parameters [[n,Θ(n^{2/3}),Θ(log(n))]].

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In this talk I will describe the correspondence between the double scaling limit of the SYK model and infinite temperature and de Sitter gravity in 2 and 3 dimensions. The dictionary involves a precise match between the chord rules that govern the SYK correlation functions and the braid interactions between line operators in the gravity theory.

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In the presence of radiation from bright astrophysical sources at radio frequencies, axion dark matter can undergo stimulated decay to two nearly back-to-back photons, meaning that bright sources could have faint counterimages in other parts of the sky. The counterimages will be spectrally distinct from backgrounds, taking the form of a narrow radio line centered at half the axion mass with a spectral width determined by Doppler broadening in the dark matter halo. In essence, axions behave as an imperfect monochromatic mirror. The morphology of the induced images can be nontrivial, with blurring due to the geometry of the source and image as well as spatial smearing due to the galactic kinematics of axion dark matter. I will show that the axion decay-induced counterimages of galactic sources may be bright enough to be detectable with archival data from CHIME and other ongoing or planned radio surveys. CHIME therefore can run as a competitive axion experiment simultaneously with other science objectives, requiring no new hardware.

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One big question in the physics of large-scale structures is how we can trace back the evolution of cosmic structures and reconstruct the initial density field. The universe we observe today is dotted with galaxy clusters separated by vast voids, in sharp contrast to its initial state, which was nearly uniform with only minor density fluctuations. The evolution from this early uniformity to today's complex structure of galaxies is a profound transformation, with many intermediate processes still unexplained. This talk focuses on this transformation, aiming to reconstruct both the initial density and the displacement fields of galaxies observed in spectroscopic surveys. I will discuss new reconstruction algorithms that depend weakly, if at all, on a cosmological model. These algorithms have paved the way for new astrophysical achievements in several directions, such as: Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) analysis, morphological analysis of proto-halos, and kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (kSZ) effect.

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The code space of a quantum error-correcting code can often be identified with the degenerate ground-space within a gapped phase of quantum matter. We argue that the stability of such a phase is directly related to a set of coherent error processes against which this quantum error-correcting code (QECC) is robust: such a quantum code can recover from adiabatic noise channels, corresponding to random adiabatic drift of code states through the phase, with asymptotically perfect fidelity in the thermodynamic limit, as long as this adiabatic evolution keeps states sufficiently "close" to the initial ground-space. We further argue that when specific decoders -- such as minimum-weight perfect matching -- are applied to recover this information, an error-correcting threshold is generically encountered within the gapped phase. In cases where the adiabatic evolution is known, we explicitly show examples in which quantum information can be recovered by using stabilizer measurements and Pauli feedback, even up to a phase boundary, though the resulting decoding transitions are in different universality classes from the optimal decoding transitions in the presence of incoherent Pauli noise. This provides examples where non-local, coherent noise effectively decoheres in the presence of syndrome measurements in a stabilizer QECC.

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