Talks

What is everything in the universe made of? What was the universe like billions of years ago? These are eternal questions that humans have pondered throughout the ages. Today, we are on the verge of potentially making revolutionary breakthroughs in answering them. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is a 27-kilometre long underground experiment located on the Swiss-French border near Geneva. It smashes subatomic particles together at vast speeds in an effort to learn more about the fundamental building blocks that make up everything around you. It is the biggest, most ambitious scientific experiment in human history. On December 13, the LHC announced the latest findings in its search for the last undiscovered particle in our current model of subatomic particles. This particle is the near-mythical 'Higgs Boson' — the particle thought to be involved in giving other particles their mass. This educational event, geared towards high school students, teachers and the general public, followed CERN's announcement and discussed its findings and implications in clear, accessible language. Host Damian Pope and PI Researchers Natalia Toro, Philip Schuster, and experimental particle physicist Andy Haas of New York University participate in an informative and interactive discussion.

I will discuss some work on the collider phenomenology and cosmology of light gravitino dark matter, and will touch on some related issues concerning infrared divergences in charged-particle decay at finite temperature.
Light gravitinos, with mass in the eV to MeV range, are well-motivated in particle physics, but their status as dark-matter candidates is muddled by early-Universe uncertainties.

Both Tevatron experiments have recently reported an anomalous forward-backward asymmetry in top-antitop production. Their inclusive results are roughly 3 standard deviations larger than the standard model prediction and may be evidence of new physics that couples to the top quark. In this talk, I will present a weakly-coupled light axigluon model (< Mtop) with flavor universal couplings as a possible explanation. Surprisingly,a particle with these properties can generate a large ttbar asymmetry with model-parameters safe from dijet resonance searches, flavor changing neutral currents, and constraints from the Z pole.

Although the typical physical system achieves an ordered state at low temperatures, spin liquids stay disordered even in their ground state. In addition to an increasing number of experimental candidates for spin liquids, recent numerical work from Meng, et. al and Yan, et. al. has supplied strong numerical evidence for natural Hamiltonians having spin liquid ground states. Their featureless nature, though, makes  learning about these states particularly difficult. In this talk, we explore what variational ansatz can teach us about them. Additionally, we examine whether the canonical theoretical framework makes sense in the context of the best wave-functions. Finally, we look at what other tools we have to make sense of spin liquids.

The entanglement spectrum denotes the eigenvalues of the reduced density matrix of a region in the ground state of a many-body system. Given these eigenvalues, one can compute the entanglement entropy of the region, but the full spectrum contains much more information. I will review geometric methods to extract this spectrum for special subregions in lorentz and conformally invariant field theories (and any theory whose universal low energy physics is captured by such a field theory). Using this technology, I give a new proof that the entanglement spectrum in quantum hall states is the same as that of a physical edge. I will discuss a number of other applications of the formalism, including, if there is time, a more complicated calculation of universal terms in the entanglement entropy at certain deconfined quantum critical points. The ultimate messages are that geometry is intimately bound up with entanglement and that the entanglement cut should be viewed as a physical cut.

In massive gravity the so-far-found black hole solutions on Minkowski space happen to convert horizons into a certain type of singularities. I will discuss whether these singularities can be avoided if space-time is not asymptotically Minkowskian. As an illustration, I will present an exact analytic black hole solution  which evades  the above problem by a transition at large scales to self-induced de Sitter space-time. The solution demonstrates that in massive GR, in the Schwarzschild coordinate system, a BH  metric has to be accompanied by the St\"uckelberg fields with nontrivial backgrounds to  prevent the horizons to convert into the singularities.

In this talk, I will discuss various aspects of UV-complete R-symmetric QFTs. In particular, I will focus on a small set of operators that are well-defined in many such theories, and I will argue that one can use these operators to get a (partial) non-perturbative handle on the deep IR physics, including, possibly, a handle on certain aspects of the emergent symmetries. Throughout, I will highlight applications to particle physics.

Rare earth pyrochlores, with a chemical formula A2B2O7, exhibit many interesting features in A site spin system. Depending on A site rare earth elements, spin ice and magnetically ordered phases are shown in several experiments. Moreover, they have been also focused as possible candidates of U(1) spin liquid. In order to explore such versatile phases, we study the pseudospin-1/2 model, which is quite generic to describe rare earth pyrochlores with integer spins, in the presence of spin-orbit coupling and crystalline electric field. Using a new "gauge mean field theory", we show the possible ground states, corresponding to several phases listed above.