Search Talks

Gravitational waves have uncovered a treasure trove of nearly 90 merging black holes and neutron stars, each with its own unique story to tell. In the first part of the talk, our focus will center on black hole spins, seeking to decipher the secrets hidden within, including their origins, hometowns, and the forces driving their mergers. We will challenge the belief that isolated binary black holes should have spins aligned with orbital angular momentum. We will explore the mechanisms influencing these spins, from their origins to the forces driving their mergers.

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Zoom link https://pitp.zoom.us/j/95680635803?pwd=Yll6NjFPbmpMZ1lTS0JtdUp6dG1RZz09

The theory of quantum computation has brought us rapid technological developments, together with remarkable improvements in how we understand quantum theory. In this talk, I shall describe the foundations of a theoretical programme to extend the quantum theory of computation beyond quantum theory itself, based on the recently proposed constructor theory. I will then explain a recent application of this new approach to the problem of witnessing quantum effects in gravity.

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Zoom link https://pitp.zoom.us/j/99012897226?pwd=U2hFQlU3TWxkSDIwZ1E5OHNPMVJhUT09

Linear cosmological observables, like the cosmic microwave background (CMB), 
offer a unique avenue to investigate the elusive properties of dark matter 
(DM) through its interactions with Standard Model (SM) particles. The 
precision of contemporary experiments has reached sub-percent-level accuracy 
(<1%), necessitating theoretical formalism of definitive accuracy to extract 
meaningful constraints on DM-SM interactions.
I will highlight theoretical assumptions made ubiquitously in deriving most 
constraints on DM-SM scattering interactions, which could potentially induce 
order ~1 errors--- a large margin of uncertainty for precision-cosmology. I 
will discuss the progress we have made toward finding better alternatives by 
developing the first exact implementations in well-defined, cosmologically 
relevant regions of parameter space to mitigate the errors induced by two 
widely adopted theoretical assumptions.
Our exact results provide points of reference that can help determine the 
regimes where current DM-SM scattering constraints can be trusted, and where 
we need better methods going forward. I will end by motivating a higher-order 
statistical formalism for DM-SM scattering with up to 100x greater 
sensitivity.

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Zoom link https://pitp.zoom.us/j/95952209469?pwd=TERqVlZsMVhvbzJqU1hsalhiUVYxdz09

Superradiant instabilities may create clouds of ultralight bosons around rotating black holes, forming so-called "gravitational atoms". The presence of a binary companion can induce transitions between bound states of the cloud ("resonances"), as well as from bound to unbound states ("ionization"). These processes backreact on the binary dynamics and leave characteristic imprints on the emitted GWs, carrying direct information about the mass of the boson and the state of the cloud. Even though some of the resonances can destroy the cloud before the system becomes observable in GWs, their backreaction forces the binary inclination towards attractors, opening up the possibility to infer the existence of the boson from a statistical analysis of a population of binary black holes. We also discuss implications for eccentric orbits and merger rates

Gravitational-wave observatories have established a new field of transient astronomy. The most recent LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA catalog, GWTC-3, identified 90 merging binaries, which range from a double neutron star with a total mass of 2.7 at 40 Mpc (GW170817) to a double black hole with a total mass of 150 at 5.3 Gpc (GW190521). These observations have many connections to nuclear astrophysics. They are revealing the remnants of stellar evolution and supernovae in merging binary systems, they are constraining event rates and astrophysical environments for heavy-element nucleosynthesis, and they are illuminating the dense matter dynamics inside the cores of merging neutron stars. Here, I will describe the imprint of dense matter on gravitational waves, the implications of existing observations for nuclear physics, and some prospects for the coming years including the science potential of proposed next-generation observatories like Cosmic Explorer.

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Zoom link https://pitp.zoom.us/j/99015121355?pwd=NStOc2srbEJXdW9aSTJJbDk4RWZhdz09

In this presentation, I will discuss two distinct topics, one relating to the foundational aspects of LQG and the other concerning its applicational implications.
Firstly, I will explore the U(1)^3 model of Euclidean Quantum Gravity, which serves as an interesting testing ground for the dynamics problem in LQG. With its analogous constraint structure to full gravity, the U(1)^3 model may hold the key to enhanced quantization techniques.

Secondly, I will delve into the asymptotic symmetries of General Relativity in the Ashtekar-Barbero formulation. New parity conditions for the Ashtekar-Barbero variables will be proposed, which do produce non-trivial supertranslation charges at spatial infinity. This development paves the way for investigating the quantum characteristics of supertranslation charges within the context of LQG.

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Zoom link https://pitp.zoom.us/j/99532986538?pwd=cnU0VnpJbjU4TSt4MEEzVngxb2wvdz09

The last few years have seen rapid progress in the development of quantum low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. LDPC codes, defined by their constant weight check operators, can have much better parameters than their topological counterparts like the surface code. In particular, a series of pivotal works culminated in the discovery of asymptotically good LDPC codes--those with essentially optimal rate and distance scalings. These codes allow for the possibility fault-tolerant quantum computation with very low overhead. However, for a code to be used in practice, it is necessary to efficiently identify errors from measurement outcomes to get back into the codespace. In this talk, I will present a linear-time decoder for a family of asymptotically good codes called quantum Tanner codes. Furthermore, I will show that quantum Tanner codes support single-shot decoding, which means that one measurement round suffices to perform reliable quantum error correction, even in the presence of measurement errors. These results can be seen as a step toward making quantum LDPC codes more practical.

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Zoom link https://pitp.zoom.us/j/94286584094?pwd=Q21IekhHZXI4Qlk4Y1B3MnNobmR6UT09

In this talk I will use matrix product states (MPS) to study topological families of gapped ground states in one spatial dimension. To such families I will describe how to associate a gerbe, a mathematical structure which generalizes the line bundle associated to gapped ground states in 0d. Nontriviality of the gerbe represents an obstruction to representing the family of ground states with an MPS tensor that is continuous everywhere over parameter space. I will illustrate these constructions using an exactly solvable topological family which exhibits the key physics in a simple manner.

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Zoom link https://pitp.zoom.us/j/91497524520?pwd=MkFHSW9PeGlMb2lFOTR3Qmo5clU0dz09

I will explore subtle aspects of rank-one 4d N=2 supersymmetric QFTs through their low-energy Coulomb-branch physics. The low-energy Lagrangian is famously encoded in "the Seiberg-Witten (SW) curve", which is a one-parameter family of elliptic curves. Here I will explain precisely how "global" aspects of the SQFT such as its spectrum of lines, which cannot be read off from the Lagrangian, are encoded into the SW curve -- more precisely, how they are encoded in its Mordell-Weil group of rational sections. In particular, I will
discuss in detail the difference between the pure SU(2) and the pure SO(3) N=2 SYM theories from this low-energy perspective. I will also comment on the global forms of rank-one 5d SCFTs compactified on a circle.

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Zoom link https://pitp.zoom.us/j/94967350368?pwd=SHZZUnZNL3ZveFc3NElCaVc5YkY3Zz09

Deep learning (DL) methods have demonstrated great potential for extracting rich non-linear information from cosmological fields, a challenge that traditional summary statistics struggle to address. Most of these DL methods are discriminative models, i.e., they directly learn the posterior constraints of cosmological parameters. In this talk, I will make the argument that learning the field-level likelihood function using generative modeling approaches such as Normalizing Flows usually leads to more effective extraction of cosmological information. This approach also enables anomaly detection to improve the robustness of the analysis. To scale the modeling to high dimensional data and improve its generalization capabilities, we further incorporate physical inductive biases, such as symmetries and multiscale structure, into the architecture of the normalizing flow models. On mock weak lensing maps, I will show that the model leads to significant improvement in constraining power compared to power spectrum and alternative DL models. I will also show that it is able to detect domain shifts between training simulations and test data, such as noise miscalibration and baryonic effect, which, if left unaddressed, could introduce systematic biases in parameter constraints. Finally, I will talk about our ongoing work on applying this model to the field-level cosmic shear analysis for HSC.

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Zoom link https://pitp.zoom.us/j/97478701784?pwd=UVg4TVp1WFArcXNETG5ITGd0S0NuZz09

It is known that the classical O(N) model in dimension d > 3 at its bulk critical point admits three boundary universality classes: the ordinary, the extraordinary and the special. The extraordinary fixed point corresponds to the bulk transition occurring in the presence of an ordered boundary, while the special fixed point corresponds to a boundary phase transition between the ordinary and the extra-ordinary classes. While the ordinary fixed point survives in d = 3, it is less clear what happens to the extraordinary and special fixed points when d = 3 and N is greater or equal to 2. I'll show that formally treating N as a continuous parameter, there exists a critical value Nc > 2 separating two distinct regimes. For N < Nc the extra-ordinary fixed point survives in d = 3, albeit in a modified form: the long-range boundary order is lost, instead, the order parameter correlation function decays as a power of log r. For N > Nc there is no fixed point with order parameter correlations decaying slower than power law. I'll discuss how these findings compare to recent Monte-Carlo studies of classical and quantum spin models.

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Zoom link https://pitp.zoom.us/j/97209122334?pwd=UHQ2OXR4bnVZREV0SlJOYXphWjh0QT09