Talks

Based on first-principle calculations, we show that a family of nonmagnetic materials including TaAs, TaP, NbAs, and NbP are Weyl semimetals (WSM) without inversion centers. We find twelve pairs of Weyl points in the whole Brillouin zone (BZ) for each of them. In the absence of spin-orbit coupling (SOC), band inversions in mirror-invariant planes lead to gapless nodal rings in the energy-momentum dispersion. The strong SOC in these materials then opens full gaps in the mirror planes, generating nonzero mirror Chern numbers and Weyl points off the mirror planes. The transport properties obtained by the Boltzmann equation combined with the semiclassical treatments of the unique electronic structure in these materials will also be discussed in comparison with the most recent experimental data.

For a CFT perturbed by a relevant operator, the entanglement entropy of a spherical region may be computed as a perturbative expansion in the coupling.  A similar perturbative expansion applies for excited states near the vacuum.  I will describe a method due to Faulkner for calculating these entanglement entropies, and apply it in the limit of small sphere size.  The motivation for these calculations is a recent proposal by Jacobson suggesting an equivalence between the Einstein equation and the "maximal vacuum entanglement hypothesis" for quantum gravity.  This proposal relies on a conjecture about the behavior of entanglement entropies for small spheres.  The calculations presented here suggest that this conjecture must be modified, but I will discuss how Jacobson's derivation still applies under the modified conjecture.  

A simple way to trivially satisfy precision-electroweak and flavor constraints in composite Higgs models is to require a large global symmetry breaking scale, f > 10 TeV. This leads to a tuning of order 10^-4 to obtain the observed Higgs mass, but gives rise to a 'split' spectrum where the strong-sector resonances with masses greater than 10 TeV are separated from the pseudo Nambu-Goldstone bosons, which remain near the electroweak scale. To preserve gauge-coupling unification (due to a composite top quark), the symmetry breaking scale satisfies an upper bound f < 100-1000 TeV, which implies that the resonances are not arbitrarily heavy and may be accessible at future colliders. Furthermore, by identifying dark matter with a pseudo Nambu-Goldstone boson, the smallest coset space containing a stable, scalar singlet and an unbroken SU(5) symmetry is SU(7) / SU(6) x U(1). Interestingly, this coset space also contains a metastable color-triplet pseudo Nambu-Goldstone boson that can decay via a displaced vertex when produced at colliders, leading to a distinctive signal of unnaturalness.

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) has been pushing our measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background on small scales to high resolution and deeper sensitivity since 2008. While ACT stopped taking temperature-only measurements in 2010, ACTPol is now operating with polarisation-sensitive detectors. I will present some of the current ACTPol results in terms of the power spectrum constraints. In addition, I'll highlight some of our recent results using ACTPol data, including detections of both the thermal and the kinetic Sunyaev- Zel'dovich effects through cross-correlation with other probes. I'll discuss the lensing of the small-scale microwave sky as measured by ACT and discus how cross-correlating CMB lensing with other probes gives us a handle on galaxy properties like bias. Finally, I'll discuss the next stage in small-scale CMB cosmology: Advanced ACTPol, which will improve our understanding of the reionisation of the universe - arguably our least constrained epoch to date.

In this talk, I will discuss correlations that can be generated by performing local measurements on bipartite quantum systems. I'll present an algebraic characterization of the set of quantum correlations which allows us to identify an easy-to-compute lower bound on the smallest Hilbert space dimension needed to generate a quantum correlation. I will then discuss some examples showing the tightness of our lower bound. Also, the algebraic characterization can be used to express the set of quantum correlations as the projection of an affine section of the cone of completely positive semidefinite matrices. Using this, we identify a semidefinite programming outer approximation to the set of quantum correlations which is contained in the first level of the Navascués, Pironio and Acín hierarchy, and a linear conic programming problem formulating exactly the quantum value of a nonlocal game. Time permitting, I will discuss other consequences of these conic formulations and some interesting special cases.

This talk is based on work with Antonios Varvitsiotis and Zhaohui Wei, arXiv:1507.00213 and arXiv:1506.07297.