Talks

The venerable proton continues to play a central role in fundamental particle physics.   Neutrinos scatter from protons in neutrino oscillation experiments, Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) are expected to scatter from protons in dark matter searches, and electrons or muons are bound by protons in precision atomic spectroscopy.   Our understanding of the proton is an obstacle to the success of next generation experiments hoping to discover CP violation in the lepton sector and determine the neutrino mass hierarchy, discover the particle nature of dark matter, or reveal new interactions such as those that violate lepton universality.  In this talk I present (i) an overview of the current state of knowledge in the neutrino sector, and theoretical advances that will determine a crucial missing ingredient in the predicted signal process of neutrino-nucleus scattering at long baseline neutrino oscillation experiments (ii) the first complete calculation of the scattering cross section of a proton on a static electroweak source, which determines WIMP-nucleus scattering rates at underground direct detection experiments and (iii) the status of the proton radius puzzle, whose most "mundane" resolution requires a 5 standard deviation shift in the value of the Rydberg constant.   I describe how each of these problems has spurred the development of powerful new methods in effective quantum field theory.

We give a new theoretical solution to a leading-edge experimental challenge, namely to the verification of quantum computations in the regime of high computational complexity. Our results are given in the language of quantum interactive proof systems. Specifically, we show that any language in BQP has a quantum interactive proof system with a polynomial-time classical verifier (who can also prepare random single-qubit pure states), and a quantum polynomial-time prover. Here, soundness is unconditional---i.e it holds even for computationally unbounded provers. Compared to prior work achieving similar results, our technique does not require the encoding of the input or of the computation; instead, we rely on encryption of the input (together with a method to perform computations on encrypted inputs), and show that the random choice between three types of input (defining a "computational run", versus two types of "test runs") suffice. As a proof technique, we use a reduction to an entanglement-based protocol; this enables a relatively simple analysis for a situation that has previously remained ambiguous in the literature.

Almost fifteen years after LIGO started listening to the cosmos, and 100 years after Einstein discovered general relativity, gravitational waves have been detected by ground-based interferometers, opening a new window on the universe. In this talk I will address some of the most exciting areas of research advanced LIGO will allow us to explore in the coming years. Detection and characterization of gravitational wave transients will be discussed, as well as their impact on astrophysics.