High Energy Physics

A systematic method to construct 4d N=2 supersymmetric theories by compactifying M5-branes on a Riemann surface was found by Gaiotto last year. This suggests that any physical quantity of the 4d theory should be reflected in another physical quantity of the 2d theory living on the Riemann surface. Indeed, one finds that the instanton partition function of the 4d theories equals the conformal blocks of the 2d theory. I would like to illustrate this construction through explicit examples.

WIMPless dark matter offers an attractive framework in which dark matter can be very light. We investigate the implications of such scenarios on invisible decays of bottomonium states for dark matter with a mass less than around $5 {\rm GeV}$. We relate these decays to measurements of nucleon-dark matter elastic scattering. We also investigate the effect that a coupling to $s$ quarks has on flavor changing $b\to s$ processes involving missing energy.

We apply newly-developed techniques for studying perturbative scattering amplitudes to gauge theories with matter. It is well known that the N=4 SYM theory has a very simple S-matrix; do other gauge theories see similar simplifications in their S-matrices? It turns out the one-loop gluon S-matrix simplifies if the matter representations satisfy some group theoretic constraints. In particular, these constraints can be expressed as linear Diophantine equations involving the higher order Indices (or higher-order Casimirs) of these representations. We solve these constraints to find examples of theories whose gluon scattering amplitudes are as simple as those of the N=4 theory. This class includes the N=2, SU(K) theory with a symmetric and anti-symmetric tensor hypermultiplet. Non-supersymmetric theories with appropriately tuned matter content can also see remarkable simplifications. We find an infinite class of non-supersymmetric amplitudes that are cut-constructible even though naive power counting would suggest the presence of rational remainders.

Gamma rays from WIMP annihilation are an important signal through which we search for non-gravitational interactions of dark matter. In particular, lines in the energy spectrum of gamma rays provide a signal which is difficult for conventional astrophysics to fake, and are thus promising despite the fact that such lines are generically expect to be suppressed, arising from one loop processes. I will discuss two theories which have an interesting family of gamma ray lines and discuss how such lines can reveal information about the WIMPs and the dark sector.

We investigate a simple theory where Baryon number (B) and Lepton number (L) are local gauge symmetries. In this theory B and L are on the same footing and the anomalies are cancelled by adding a single new fermionic generation. There is an interesting realization of the seesaw mechanism for neutrino masses. Furthermore there is a natural suppression of flavour violation in the quark and leptonic sectors since the gauge symmetries and particle content forbid tree level flavor changing neutral currents involving the quarks or charged leptons. Also one finds that the stability of a dark matter candidate is an automatic consequence of the gauge symmetry. Some constraints and signals at the Large Hadron Collider are briefly discussed.

Two of the most exciting observables in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, which could deeply impact our picture of the early universe, are non-Gaussianity and tensor modes. A potential detection of tensor modes can be explained in terms of a model of large field inflation. Theoretical considerations suggest that a symmetry should be invoked in order to protect the flatness of the inflaton potential and hence an axion enjoying a shift symmetry is a natural candidate. As main example, I will present a model of inflation in string theory based on axion monodromy. Non-perturbative effects typically correct the axion potential leading to small sinusoidal modulations on top of an otherwise flat slow roll potential. It can be shown analytically that a resonance between the oscillations of the background and the oscillations of the curvature fluctuations is responsible for the production of an observably large non-Gaussian signal. An explicit expression for the shape of this resonant non-Gaussianity will be presented. There is essentially no overlap between this shape and the local, equilateral, and orthogonal shapes, and in fact resonant non-Gaussianity is not captured by the simplest version of the effective field theory of inflation. Hopefully the analytic expression for resonant non-Gaussianity will be useful to further observationally constrain this class of models.

I will review the progress made in our understanding of the QCD phase diagram within an RG approach to QCD and effective QCD models. In particular this includes a discussion of the confinement-deconfinement phase transition/cross-over, the chiral phase transition/cross-over, as well as their interrelation.

F-theory based vacua provide a potentially promising starting point for realizing Grand Unified Theories (GUTs) in string theory. In minimal realizations of this framework based on a point of E8 unification, this turns out to be quite constraining, and leads to specific expectations for the form of supersymmetry breaking. We discuss how the parameters of the F-theory GUT determine the sparticle spectrum, and possible signatures at the LHC.

We show that when a volume of quark matter rotates, there is an axial current flowing along the rotation axis. This effect has been overlooked in all previous treatments of relativistic fluids until calculations using gauge/gravity duality indicate it existence. The effect is a manifestation of triangle anomalies, and may exhibit itself in heavy ion collisions with nonzero impact parameter.

Viscosity is a very old concept which was introduced to physics by Navier in the 19th century. However, in strongly coupled systems, the viscosity is usually difficult to compute. In this talk I will describe how gauge/gravity duality, a by-product of string theory, allows one to compute the viscosity for a class of strongly interacting fluids not too dissimilar to the quark gluon plasma. I will also describe efforts to measure the viscosity and other physical properties of the quark gluon plasma at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.

We describe a class of non-Fermi liquid systems, using the AdS/CFT correspondence. The Fermi surfaces are studied by computing the response functions of fermionic operators. The scaling behavior near the Fermi surfaces is determined by conformal dimensions in an emergent IR CFT. The low-energy excitations near the Fermi momenta are not Landau quasiparticles. When the operator is marginal in the IR CFT, the full spectral function is precisely of the `marginal Fermi liquid' form, introduced as a phenomenological model of the `strange metal' phase of high temperature superconductors.