High Energy Physics

I will discuss recent work studying universal properties of gravity in anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime from the perspective of conformal field theory (CFT). After reviewing relevant aspects of the AdS/CFT correspondence, I will demonstrate that all CFTs in three or more dimensions possess a spectrum of operators consistent with long-distance locality and Newtonian gravity in AdS. In generalizing these results to two-dimensional CFTs, I will then show that operators with large scaling dimension create classical backgrounds in the limit of large central charge. This result can be directly related to eigenstate thermalization in 2d CFTs and black hole geometries in 3d AdS. I will conclude by discussing methods for going beyond this large central charge limit in 2d and for studying black holes in higher dimensions.

The Most Wanted Particle

In what promises to be a smashing public lecture, Jon Butterworth will give a personal account of what it is like to work on the largest experiment ever built, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. He will recount the excitement and tension surrounding the quest, under unprecedented media and public attention, to find the famous Higgs boson. Butterworth, a physics professor at University College London (UCL), will explain the motivation and importance of the Higgs search, discuss his specific research at CERN’s ATLAS detector, and speculate on the exciting breakthroughs that still await in the world of high-energy physics.

The discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider marks the culmination of a decades-long hunt for the last ingredient of the Standard Model. At the same time, this discovery has started a new era in the search for more fundamental physics. In this talk, I will discuss what we have learned from the Higgs discovery about the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking and the implications for the existence of additional Higgs bosons. I will then highlight the future prospects of the Higgs boson in shedding light on New Physics and in particular on the nature of Dark Matter.

We will discuss techniques for computing 4-point functions of local operators in 2D conformal field theories, and their implications for semiclassical 3D quantum gravity. For generic 4-point functions, we present new closed-form expansions of the Virasoro conformal blocks. Specializing to correlators of holomorphic operators, these can be efficiently and exactly determined using an analytic implementation of the conformal bootstrap. Applying this method to the sewing construction of 2D CFT partition functions, we compute, via AdS/CFT, the semiclassical expansion of pure 3D quantum gravity around saddle point geometries of genus two; unlike at genus one, this expansion does not truncate at finite loop order.