Search Talks

In this talk I will review the state of the art in PN gravity, and in particular its significant advancement via the EFT of spinning gravitating objects. First, I will introduce the concept of a tower of EFTs for the binary inspiral problem. I will then present the intricate formulation of the EFT of spinning objects. Finally, I will present some advanced results accomplished within this framework.

We propose a unified manner of understanding two important phenomena: color confinement in large-N gauge theory, and Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC). We do this by clarifying the relation between the standard criteria, based on the off-diagonal long range order (ODLRO) for the BEC and the Polyakov loop for gauge theory: the constant offset of the distribution of Polyakov line phase is ODLRO. Indistinguishability associated with the symmetry group --- SU(N) or O(N) in gauge theory, and S_N permutation in the system of identical bosons --- plays the key role in both cases. This viewpoint may have implications to confinement at finite N, and to quantum gravity via gauge/gravity duality. 

I will consider simple scalar gauge theories with one scalar field in a low-dimensional representation of a gauge group. The renormalizable action often has accidental symmetries that lead to one or more stable states, providing Dark Matter candidates. The gauge group can confine, or be spontaneously broken by the scalar field: I will discuss the spectrum and symmetries in both cases, focusing in particular on possible dualities between the Higgs and confined phases. I will then discuss the Dark Matter phenomenology in a few illustrative cases, showing that the thermal relic abundance can reproduce the cosmological value for masses around 100 TeV.

The elliptic genus is a powerful deformation invariant of 1+1D SQFTs: if it is nonzero, then it protects the SQFT from admitting a deformation to one with spontaneous supersymmetry breaking. I will describe a "secondary" invariant, defined in terms of mock modularity, that goes beyond the elliptic genus, protecting SQFTs with vanishing elliptic genus. The existence of this invariant supports the hypothesis that the space of minimally supersymmetric 1+1D SQFTs provides a geometric model for universal elliptic cohomology. Based on joint works with D. Gaiotto and E. Witten.