Talks

I will describe a tidal effect whereby the decay of primordial gravity waves leaves a permanent shear in the large-scale structure of the Universe. Future large-scale structure surveys - especially radio surveys of high-redshift hydrogen gas - could measure this shear and its spatial dependence to form a map of the initial gravity-wave field. The three dimensional nature of this probe makes it sensitive to the helicity of the gravity waves, allowing for searches for early-Universe gravitational parity violation. Due to the large number of measurable modes in the high-redshift large-scale structure, these tidal imprints could ultimately be more sensitive than searches for CMB B-modes.

It is easy to prove that d-dimensional complex Hilbert space can contain at most d^2 equiangular lines.  But despite considerable evidence and effort, sets of this size have only been proved to exist for finitely many d.  Such sets are relevant in quantum information theory, where they define optimal quantum measurements known as SIC-POVMs (Symmetric Informationally Complete Positive Operator-Valued Measures).  They also correspond to complex projective 2-designs of the minimum possible cardinality.   Numerical evidence points to their existence for all d as orbits of finite Heisenberg groups, the current record being d=844 [Scott-Grassl '17].  However, to date, they are only proven to exist for finitely many d (the current record being d=323 [SG17]) via computer-assisted calculations in number fields of degree increasing with d.  In this talk, I will discuss the structure of these number fields, which turn out to be specific abelian extensions of specific real quadratic number fields [Appleby, Flammia, McConnell, Y. 1604.06098].  Such fields are known to exist by general theorems of class field theory, but until now, had never been found 'explicitly' in Nature.  This contrasts the classical situation for abelian extensions of CM fields, which are generated by the torsion points of abelian varieties with complex multiplication.   All known Heisenberg-covariant SIC-POVMs have unitary symmetries under the associated Weil representation that are intimately related to the structure of the underlying number fields.  A proper understanding of this relationship may ultimately lead to a general proof of their existence in all dimensions, rather than the finite number of examples currently proved to exist. 

We consider classical, pure Yang-Mills theory in a box. We show how a set of static electric fields that solve the theory in an adiabatic limit correspond to geodesic motion on the space of vacua, equipped with a particular Riemannian metric that we identify. The vacua are generated by spontaneously broken global gauge symmetries, leading to an infinite number of conserved momenta of the geodesic motion. We show that these correspond to the soft multipole charges of Yang-Mills theory.