Talks

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. 

Monitored quantum dynamics has attracted much research attention recently. Environmental monitoring typically leads to the decoherence of a quantum system. We explore the effect of energy-level decoherence in quench dynamics. In particular, we consider the linear quench across quantum critical phase transitions under the influence of decoherence. Due to the critical slowing down, the system will necessarily fall out of equilibrium in the vicinity of the critical point within a time scale known as the freeze-out time. The freeze-out time will scale with the quench rate following the Kibble-Zurek scaling. In the presence of decoherence, we found a new scaling behavior differed from the Kibble-Zurek scaling. We demonstrated our findings in the critical quench between 2D Chern insulator and trivial insulator. We show that the new scaling behavior can be justified from the behavior of Hall conductivity across the quantum quench.

The Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE), hosted at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy, is the first tonne-scale cryogenic experiment searching for neutrinoless double-beta decay (0nuDBD) of 130Te. The observation of this process would prove that lepton number is not a symmetry of nature and that neutrinos are Majorana particles. CUORE, started in 2017, is currently in stable data taking: a raw exposure of ~ 1 tonne yr has recently been achieved. In this talk, the most recent results of CUORE for the 0nuDBD channel as well as for other physical processes of interest (2nuDBD, decays to excited states,..) will be presented, together with a review of the detector features and performance.