High Energy Physics

We add a gravitational background lattice to the simplest holographic model of matter at finite density and calculate the optical conductivity. With the lattice, the zero frequency delta function found in previous calculations (resulting from translation invariance) is broadened and the DC conductivity is finite. The optical conductivity exhibits a Drude peak with a cross-over to power-law behavior at higher frequencies. Surprisingly, these results bear a strong resemblance to the properties of some of the cuprates.

Precision timepieces are marvels of human ingenuity. Over the past half-a-century, precision time-keeping has been carried out with atomic clocks. I will review a novel and rapidly developing class of atomic clocks, optical lattice clocks. At their projected accuracy level, these would neither lose nor gain a fraction of a second over estimated age of the Universe. In other words, if someone were to build such a clock at the Big Bang and if such a timepiece were to survive the 14 billion years, the clock would be off by no more than a mere second. What can we do with this new-found precision? How can we exploit this exquisite ability to listen carefully for probing new physics?

In the second part of my talk I will overview atomic searches for new physics beyond the Standard Model of elementary particles.  I will report on a refined analysis of table-top experiments on violation of mirror symmetry in atoms. This analysis sets new constraints on a hypothesized particle, the extra
Z-boson. Our raised bound on the Z' masses improves upon the Tevatron results and carves out a
lower-energy part of the discovery reach of the Large Hadron Collider.

A local renormalization group procedure is proposed where length scale is changed in spacetime dependent manner. Combining this scheme with an earlier observation that high energy modes in renormalization group play the role of dynamical sources for low energy modes at each scale, we provide a prescription to derive background independent holographic duals for field theories. From a first principle construction, it is shown that the holographic theory dual to a D-dimensional matrix field theory is a (D+1)-dimensional quantum theory of gravity coupled with matter fields of various spins.The (D+1)-dimensional diffeomorphism invariance is a consequence of the freedom to choose different local RG schemes.

A beautiful understanding of the smallness of the neutrino masses may be obtained via the seesaw mechanism, whereby one takes advantage of the key qualitative distinction between the neutrinos and the other fermions: right-handed neutrinos are gauge singlets, and may therefore have large Majorana masses. The standard seesaw mechanism, however, does not address the apparent lack of hierarchy in the neutrino masses compared to the quarks and charged leptons, nor the large leptonic mixing angles compared to the small angles of the CKM matrix. In this talk, I will show that the singlet nature of the right-handed neutrinos may be taken advantage of in one further way in order to solve these remaining problems: Unlike particles with gauge interactions, whose numbers are constrained by anomaly cancellation, the number of gauge singlet particles is essentially undetermined. If large numbers of gauge singlet fermions are present at high energies - as is suggested, for example, by various string constructions - then the effective low energy neutrino mass matrix may be determined as a sum over many distinct Yukawa couplings, with the largest ones being the most important. This can reduce hierarchy, and lead to large mixing angles. Assuming a statistical distribution of fundamental parameters, we will show that this scenario leads to a good fit to low energy phenomenology, with only a few qualitative assumptions guided by the known quark and lepton masses. The scenario leads to predictions of a normal hierarchy for the neutrino masses, and a value for the |m_ee| mass matrix element of about 1-6 meV.

We present a new model of inflation which does not rely on fundamental scalar fields.  The theory is a conformally invariant gauge field theory minimally coupled to massless fermions.  At the beginning of inflation, the conformal symmetry is dynamically broken by a BCS condensation of the fermions, leading to a spontaneously violation of conformal symmetry.  A quasi de-Sitter inflationary regime is driven by the interaction between a homogenous plasma dynamo between the gauge, gravitational and condensate field.  Unique observational consequences of this model are twofold : (1) The sourcing of B-mode vorticity fluctuations in upcoming CMB powerspectra. (2) A possible inflationary Baryogenesis mechanism connected to the initial conditions of inflation.

In 2-dim it is known that a unitary, well defined quantum field theory, if scale invariant must also be invariant under conformal transformations. Whether this is also true in dimensions higher than two has been an open question for decades. We have discovered renomalization group flows in 4-epsilon dimensions corresponding to scale but not conformal invariant theories. The flows correspond to limit cycles or ergodic behavior,  neither of which had been reported in relativistic quantum field theories either.   There seems to be a deep connection between scale without conformal invariance and this type of renormalization group  behavior. We will present these results and list some of open questions, including the possibility of such behavior in integral dimensions.

It is well known that on-shell recursion relation can be applied to tree-level amplitude in string theory. One technical issue of the application is the sum of infinite middle on-shell states. We discuss how we can do the sum exactly to reproduce the known result.

With the emergence of the dark sector in cosmology,  a variety of modified theories of gravity have come to the fore. I will discuss a framework which can be used to test gravity on large scales and the observational programmes that might lead to the tightest constraints.