Search Talks

We consider conformal blocks of two heavy operators and an arbitrary  number of light operators in a 1+1 dimensional CFT with large central charge. Using the monodromy method, these higher-point  conformal blocks are shown to factorize into products of 4-point conformal blocks in the heavy-light limit for a class of OPE channels. This result is reproduced by considering suitable worldline configurations in the bulk conical defect geometry. We apply the CFT results to calculate the entanglement entropy of an arbitrary number of  disjoint intervals for heavy states. The corresponding holographic entanglement entropy calculated via the minimal area prescription precisely matches these results from CFT.

We describe a new solution to the strong CP problem inspired by the massless up quark solution. At high energies, QCD is embedded in a SU(3)xSU(3)xSU(3) model, with each matter generation charged under a different site. Instanton effects are unsuppressed at the scale of Higgsing to the SM diagonal QCD, and a set of anomalous U(1)_PQ symmetries removes the low-energy strong CP phase. A non-zero theta parameter is generated at loop level near current bounds. Similar models can also lead to a heavy axion solution to the strong CP problem.

What natural CFT quantities can “see” in the interior of the bulk AdS in a diffeomorphism invariant way? And how can we use them to learn about the emergence of local bulk physics? Inspired by the Ryu-Takayanagi relation, we construct a class of simple non-local operators on both sides of the duality and demonstrate their equivalence. Integrals of free bulk fields along geodesics/minimal surfaces are dual to what we will call “OPE blocks”: Individual conformal family contributions to the OPE of local operators. Our findings can be utilized to reconstruct local bulk operators and unify a number of previously disconnected AdS/CFT results. We extend this kinematic correspondence to incorporate gravitational interactions in AdS3 by relating geodesic operators to the Virasoro OPE blocks, hence providing a natural CFT prescription for “gravitational dressing”. We conclude with discussion of preliminary results on an interesting CFT structure that generalizes our dictionary to include arbitrary local bulk interactions. 

Painlevé equations can be obtained both from time-dependent classical Hamiltonian systems and from isomonodromic deformation problems. These realizations lead to a precise matching between Painlevé equations and Hitchin systems associated to four-dimensional N=2 SQCD as well as Argyres-Douglas theories. Long-time analysis of the Painlevé Hamiltonians dynamics allows to extract the unrefined "instanton" partition function for these theories at all strong-coupling points

The T2K experiment studies neutrino properties by producing a beam of muon neutrinos and sending them 295 km across Japan to the Super-Kamiokande detector. En route, neutrinos undergo a transmutation known as “neutrino oscillations” wherein they can transition to two other species or flavours, electron and tau neutrinos. Starting in 2014, T2K has run with an antineutrino beam to study the corresponding antineutrino oscillations and the possibility that a  complex phase in the neutrino mass and flavour mixing may lead to differences in neutrino and antineutrino oscillations. Such a difference may provide a critical clue into how our universe came to be dominated by matter.  I will present the latest results from an analysis of T2K neutrino and antineutrino data taken through 2016 along with other recent results from other experiments, and discuss their implications for our understanding of neutrinos.

We study chiral algebras associated with Argyres-Douglas theories engineered from M5 brane. For the theory engineered using 6d (2,0) type J theory on a sphere with a single irregular singularity (without mass parameter), its chiral algebra is the minimal model of W algebra of JJ type. For the theory engineered using an irregular singularity and a regular full singularity, its chiral algebra is the affine Kac-Moody algebra of JJ type. We can obtain the Schur and Hall-Littlewood index of these theories by computing the vacua character of the corresponding chiral algebra.

Lack of fine tuning in effective field theory does not ensure that a particular scenario is natural or even realizable in a UV complete theory of quantum gravity. Large field axion inflation appears natural from the effective field theory perspective, but I argue that it is tuned from a quantum gravity perspective. The argument is based on the Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC), a conjectural universal feature of quantum gravity that is present in all known string theory examples. In the process, I highlight recent progress in understanding the WGC and related conjectures about the charged spectrum of quantum gravity and discuss other potential applications, both formal and phenomenological.

In my talk I will consider resurgence properties of Chern-Simons
theory on compact 3-manifolds. I will also describe what role
resurgence plays in the problem of categorification of Chern-Simons
theory, that is the problem of generalizing Khovanov homology of knots
to compact 3-manifolds.

Supposing there exists no new physics stabilizing the weak scale, the Standard Model Higgs potential exhibits a true vacuum at large field values, rendering the electroweak vacuum metastable (i.e., long lived relative to the age of the Universe). While this scenario need not preclude our current existence, it may not reconcile with a period of large(ish)-field inflation---large fluctuations in the Higgs field, induced by the inflationary energy density, can lead to the field locally sampling the unstable/true vacuum part of the potential, with potentially disastrous consequences. Evaluating the extent to which large-field inflation and the Higgs vacuum instability are incompatible requires understanding (i) how Higgs fluctuations evolve during inflation and (ii) the fate of large local fluctuations that sample the part of the potential beyond the barrier that separates the electroweak and true vacua. In this talk, I will discuss both of these aspects, and explain the implications for large-field inflation.

We discuss information loss from black hole physics in AdS3, focusing on two sharp signatures infecting CFT2 correlators at large central charge c: `forbidden singularities' arising from Euclidean-time periodicity due to the effective Hawking temperature, and late-time exponential decay in the Lorentzian region. We show that these signatures can be derived from the behavior of the Virasoro conformal blocks at large central charge.  At finite c, we compute non-perturbative effects that resolve the unitarity-violation from forbidden singularities.  Finally, we elaborate on the non-perturbative behavior of Virasoro blocks by classifying all `saddles’ that can contribute for arbitrary values of external and internal operator dimensions in the semiclassical large central charge limit, and discuss their potential to resolve the problem of late-time decay in the Lorentzian regime.  

In this talk, I will present a framework in which Weinberg's anthropic explanation of the cosmological constant problem also solves the hierarchy problem. The weak scale is selected by chiral dynamics that controls the stabilization of an extra dimension. When the Higgs vacuum expectation value is close to a fermion mass scale, the radius of an extra dimension becomes large, and develops an enhanced number of vacua available to scan the cosmological constant down to its observed value. The fermion sector that controls the size of the extra dimension consists of a pair of electroweak doublets and several singlets. These leptons satisfy approximate mass relations related to the weak scale and are accessible to the LHC and future colliders. At low energies, the radion necessarily appears as an unnaturally light scalar, in a range of masses and couplings accessible to fifth-force searches as well as scalar dark matter searches with atomic clocks and gravitational-wave detectors.