High Energy Physics

The talk will be based on a work in progress with Stefano Kovacs
(Dublin IAS) and Yuki Sato (Wits University). In a previous work
(arxiv:1310.0016) we have shown that,
in the M-theory regime (large N with the Chern-Simon level k fixed)
of the duality between ABJM theory and M-theory on AdS4 x S7/Zk,
certain monopole operators with large R charges on the gauge theory side
correspond to spherical membranes
(which is in general in non-BPS excited states) in the pp-wave matrix
model on the dual side.

Having in mind application to
the study of three point functions of the monopole operators
from the dual side, we study the BPS instanton equation
of the pp-wave matrix model. The instanton equation describes, for example,
a process in which a single spherical membrane splits into
two spherical membranes. Under a certain
approximation which is valid when the matrix size is large,
the instanton equation can be recast
into a three dimensional Laplace equation;
a time snapshot of the membrane configuration corresponds
to an equipotential surface of the solution of the Laplace equation.
In order to study the above mentioned splitting process,
we found that one has to introduce a special boundary condition
of the Laplace equation: one prepares two copies of
three dimensional space which are connected in a manner analogous
to Riemann surfaces. We will discuss an exact solution
of the Laplace equation under this boundary condition, and 
the corresponding instanton solution, in which a membrane splits into two.

It is not known how to explain the excess of matter over antimatter with the Standard Model.  This matter asymmetry can be accounted for in certain extensions of the Standard Model through the mechanism of electroweak baryogenesis (EWBG), in which the extra baryons are created in the early Universe during the electroweak phase transition.  In this talk I will review EWBG, connect it to theories of new physics beyond the Standard Model, and show that in many cases the new particles and interactions required for efficient EWBG can be discovered using existing and expected data from the LHC.

In this talk I will describe recent work with Almheiri and Dong, where we proposed a connection between the emergence of bulk locality in AdS/CFT and the theory of quantum error correction. Bulk notions such as Bogoliubov transformations, location in the radial direction, and the holographic entropy bound all have natural CFT interpretations in the language of quantum error correction.  Time permitting, I will also discuss work in progress with Pastawski, Preskill, and Yoshida on a new class of stabilizer codes that explicitly realize many of the properties we argued the AdS/CFT error correcting code should have.  

I will describe a new collider object we have termed emerging jets.
These can arise when there is a confining dark sector connected to the
Standard Model by a TeV scale mediator, a scenario that is well
motivated by dark matter considerations. The signature of an emerging
jet is O(10) displaced vertices inside the jet each with different
impact parameter, and a small number of prompt tracks. I will describe
strategies that can be used to discover emerging jets even if they
have very small cross sections.

Holographic duality is a duality between gravitational systems and non-gravitational systems. In this talk, I will propose a different approach for understanding holographic duality named as the exact holographic mapping. The key idea of this approach can be summarized by two points: 1) The bulk theory and boundary theory are related by a unitary mapping in the Hilbert space. 2) Space-time geometry is determined by the structure of correlations and quantum entanglement in a quantum state. When applied to lattice systems, the holographic mapping is defined by a unitary tensor network. For free fermion boundary theories, I will discuss how different bulk geometries are obtained as dual theories of different boundary states. A particularly interesting case is the AdS black hole geometry and the interpretation of the interior of a black hole. We will also discuss dual geometries of topological states of matter.

The analogy between Multi-scale Entanglement Renormalization
Ansatz (MERA) and the spatial slice of three-dimensional anti-de
Sitter space (AdS3) has motivated a great interest in tensor networks
among holographers. I discuss a way to promote this analogy to a
rigorous, quantitative, and constructive relation. A key quantitative
ingredient is the way the strong subadditivity of entanglement entropy
is encoded in MERA and in a holographic spacetime. The upshot is that
the map between MERA and the spatial slice of AdS3 is mediated through
an additional integral transform. Interpreted directly, MERA is a
discretization not of the spatial slice of AdS3, but of the space of
geodesics on the spatial slice of AdS3.