High Energy Physics

The course is an introduction to quantum field theory in curved spacetime. Upon building up the general formalism, the latter is applied to several topics in the modern theory of gravity and cosmology where the quantum properties of fundamental fields play an essential role.

Topics to be covered:
1) Radiation of particles by moving mirrors 
2) Hawking radiation of black holes  
3) Production of primordial density perturbations and gravity waves during inflation
4) Statistical properties of the primordial spectra  

Required prior knowledge:
Foundations of quantum mechanics and general relativity

This course uses quantum electrodynamics (QED) as a vehicle for covering several more advanced topics within quantum field theory, and so is aimed at graduate students that already have had an introductory course on quantum field theory. Among the topics hoped to be covered are: gauge invariance for massless spin-1 particles from special relativity and quantum mechanics; Ward identities; photon scattering and loops; UV and IR divergences and why they are handled differently; effective theories and the renormalization group; anomalies.

This School aims at bringing together graduate students and junior postdocs, both theorists and experimentalists, who are interested in proposing and realizing new table-top experiments to test fundamental physics. The goal is to allow them to interact and learn from each other, forming a community.

The School will consist of some theoretical lectures for experimentalists, and experimental lectures for theorists. The scope is to offer basic and relevant notions of each field to physicists with a different background, in order to fill some of the gaps of the respective academic curricula.

The theoretical lectures will cover a review of the Standard Model with emphasis on precision tests, such as the search of new long-range forces and of electrical dipole moments. Another main topic will be a focused introduction on Dark Matter, looking at its cosmological production mechanisms, its impact on astrophysics and cosmology, and its laboratory detection.

On the experimental side, the School will cover a range of techniques for probing weak electromagnetic fields, short distance forces, single photons, fundamental electric dipole moments, as well as atom interferometers and optomechanical sensors.

https://pirsa.org/C22030

Territorial Land Acknowledgement

Perimeter Institute acknowledges that it is situated on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Neutral peoples.

Perimeter Institute is located on the Haldimand Tract. After the American Revolution, the tract was granted by the British to the Six Nations of the Grand River and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation as compensation for their role in the war and for the loss of their traditional lands in upstate New York. Of the 950,000 acres granted to the Haudenosaunee, less than 5 percent remains Six Nations land. Only 6,100 acres remain Mississaugas of the Credit land. 

We thank the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Neutral peoples for hosting us on their land.

This course covers three distinct topics: conformal field theory, anomalies, and string theory. The conformal field theory section of the course introduces conformal transformation and the conformal algebra, n-point functions in CFTs, and OPEs. The anomalies portion of the course focuses on the functional integral derivation of the chiral anomaly. The string theory part of the course derives the bosonic string spectrum and introduces T-duality and D-branes.

Over the years, various researchers have suggested connections between the octonions and the standard model of particle physics. The past few years, in particular, have been marked by an upsurge of activity on this subject, stimulated by the recent observation that the standard model gauge group and fermion representation can be elegantly characterized in terms of the octonions. This workshop, which will be the first ever on this topic, is intended to bring this new community together in an attempt to better understand these ideas, establish a common language, and stimulate further progress.

The workshop will consist of an hour-long talk every Monday at noon (EST), with the first talk on Monday February 8, and the final talk on Monday May 17.

 

Understanding the small-scale structure of spacetime is one of the biggest challenges faced by  modern theoretical physics. There are many different attempts to solve this problem and they reflect the diversity of approaches to quantum gravity. This workshop will bring together researchers from a wide range of quantum gravity approaches and give them an opportunity to exchange ideas and gain  new insights.