Talks

The observations of gravitational waves from the mergers of compact binary sources opens a new way to learn about the universe as well as to test General Relativity in the limit of strong gravitational interactions – the dynamics of massive bodies traveling at relativistic speeds in a highly curved space-time. The lecture will describe some of the difficult history of gravitational waves proposed about 100 years ago.  The concepts used in the instruments and the methods for data analysis that enable the measurement of gravitational wave strains of 10-21 and smaller will be presented. The results derived from the measured waveforms, their relation to the Einstein field equations and the astrophysical implications are discussed. The talk will end with a vision for the future of gravitational wave astronomy.

From a quantum information perspective, we will study universal features of chaotic quantum systems. Recent progress has made evident that quantifying chaos is a useful way to gain insight into strongly-coupled field theories, quantum many-body systems, as well as the quantum nature of black holes. We will derive relations between different diagnostics of chaos and scrambling (OTOCs, spectral functions, and frame potentials) and define a quantity to capture the onset of a random matrix description. We will review and use tools from quantum information and random matrix theory, but our goal will be to understand strongly-interacting systems.

We discuss the role of contextuality within quantum fluctuation theorems, in the light of a recent no-go result by Perarnau et al. We show that any fluctuation theorem reproducing the two-point measurement scheme for classical states either admits a notion of work quasi-probability or fails to describe protocols exhibiting contextuality.

Conversely, we describe a protocol that smoothly interpolates between the two-point measurement work distribution for projective measurements and Allahverdyan's work quasi-probability for weak measurements, and show that the negativity of the latter is a direct signature of contextuality.

Gravitational shockwaves may signal the breakdown of effective field theory near black hole horizons. Motivated by this, I will revisit the Dray-‘t Hooft solution and explain how to generalize it to the Kerr-Newman background. In doing so I will emphasize the method of spin coefficients (the Newman-Penrose formalism) in its compacted form (the Geroch-Held-Penrose formalism).

Primordial black hole (PBH), which can be naturally produced in the early universe, remains a promising dark matter candidate . It can merge with a supermassive black hole (SMBH) in the center of a galaxy and generate gravitational wave (GW) signals in the favored frequency region of LISA-like experiments. In this work, we initiate the study on the event rate calculation for such extreme mass ratio inspirals (EMRI). Including the sensitivities of various proposed GW detectors, we find that such experiments offer a novel and outstanding tool to test the scenario where PBH constitutes (fraction of) dark matter. The PBH energy density fraction of DM (fPBH) could potentially be explored as small as 10^−3∼10^−4. Further, LISA has the capability to search for PBH mass upto 10^−2∼10^−1 solar mass. Other proposed GW experiments can probe lower PBH mass regime.

Extending the EFT of Inflation by adding marginal operators in unitary gauge that can affect the equation of motion for scalar perturbations, we unravel new inflationary models in which the dispersion relations is a sixth order polynomial. In particular we focus on the healthy marginal operators that do not infiltrate ghosts into the equations of motion and allow for gravity to decouple from the Goldstone boson above some energy scale. Various scenarios can arise depending on the parameters in the original theory. In particular, one can consider scenarios in which the mode becomes tachyonic while still it is inside the horizon. More conservatively, one can consider models in which the group velocity of the propagation becomes negative. In these inflationary models, the amplitude of scalar power spectrum gets a modulation factor, which in majority of the cases is much bigger than one.  We also show that these marginal operators leave the tensor perturbations intact, and hence the form of tensor power spectrum remains resilient even in the marginally extended EFT of inflation.  Due to the enhancement of the scalar power spectrum,  the tensor-to-scalar ratio is suppressed by a huge factor..

Tensor network/spacetime correspondences explore the exciting idea that geometric information about a quantum state might be related to the actual geometry that the state describes in a quantum gravitational setting. I will give an overview of a new type of correspondence between global de Sitter spacetime and the MERA. This simple correspondence is already enough to see several features of de Sitter gravity emerge, such as cosmic no-hair and horizon complementarity. I will also comment on some more speculative topics like complexity = action and possible future directions.

The Hecke category is a certain monoidal category of constructible sheaves on a flag variety that categorifies the Hecke algebra and plays an important role in geometric representation theory. In this talk, I will discuss a monoidal Koszul duality relating the Hecke category of Langlands-dual (Kac–Moody) flag varieties, categorifying a certain involution of the Hecke algebra. In particular, I will try to explain why one needs to introduce a monoidal category of "free-monodromic tilting sheaves" to formulate this duality. (Joint with P.N. Achar, S. Riche, and G. Williamson.)