Talks

High resolution CMB experiments, such as ACT, SPT, and the Planck satellite are making precision measurements of the secondary anisotropies caused by the thermal Sunyaev Zel'dovich (tSZ) effect from galaxy clusters. However, our ability to obtain cosmological information from this tSZ signal is limited by our theoretical understanding of the baryons in clusters and groups. I will discuss how cross correlation methods are providing new windows into the messy “Gastrophysics” of the intracluster medium and the potential for these methods to constrain various cosmological parameters.

Recent progress on the construction of holographic lattices and its applications to AdS/CMT correspondence will be briefly reviewed. Our special interests will focus on the building of bulk geometry of gravity whose holographic duals exhibit metal-insulator transitions (MIT).  In particular, the Peierls phase transition induced by charge density waves is implemented in a holographic manner. The holographic entanglement entropy close to quantum critical points will be discussed as well.

In an approach to quantum gravity where space-time arises from coarse graining of fundamentally discrete structures, black hole formation and subsequent evaporation could be described by a unitary evolution without the problems encountered by standard remnant scenarios or the schemes where information is assumed to come out with the radiation while semiclassical evaporation (firewalls and complementarity). I point out the possibility that the final state is purified by correlations with the fundamental pre-geometric structures (in the sense of Wheeler) which are available in such approaches, and, like defects in the underlying space-time weave, can carry zero energy.