High Energy Physics

“Saturons" are macroscopic objects that saturate the field theoretic upper bound on microstate degeneracy. Due to their maximal microstate entropy, from a quantum information perspective, saturons and black holes belong to the same universality class with common key properties.  However, as opposed to black holes,  saturons do not require gravity and can emerge via ordinary renormalizable interactions, such as QCD, in the form  of soliton-like states. Due to this feature, saturons serve as laboratories for understanding certain properties of black holes. After reviewing the general properties of saturons, we discuss their implications for fundamental physics and cosmology. In particular, we explain how saturons can lead to a new form of phase transition. 

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Jets of hadrons produced at high-energy colliders provide experimental access to the dynamics of asymptotically free quarks and gluons and their confinement into hadrons. Motivated by recent developments in conformal field theory, we show that questions of interest in collider physics can be reformulated as the study of correlation functions of a specific class of light-ray operators and their associated operator product expansion (OPE). We show that multi-point correlation functions of these operators can be measured in real collider data, allowing us to experimentally verify the scaling properties associated with the OPE, and providing new insights into the dynamics of the confinement transition.

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I will talk about the boundary vertex operator algebra of topologically twisted 3d N=4 rank-zero SCFTs. The latter is recently introduced family of N=4 SCFTs with zero-dimensional Higgs and Coulomb branches, which are expected to support rational VOAs at the boundary. I will discuss the construction of the simplest class of rank-zero SCFTs T_r, and argue that they admit the simple affine VOAs L_r(osp(1|2)) at their boundary. In the simplest case, this leads to a physical realization of a novel level-rank duality between L_1(osp(1|2)) and the Virasoro minimal model M(2,5).

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The sexaquark, a hypothetical stable and neutral six-quark state, has been recently proposed as a dark matter candidate. Here, I argue it is very unlikely sexaquarks could consistently compose more than a billionth of the dark matter abundance for a wide range of scattering cross sections and annihilation rates. To draw these conclusions, I will connect several topics, including the sexaquark freeze-out abundance, dark matter direct detection constraints, neutrino experiments, and accumulation mechanisms for sexaquarks in the Earth. I will show how the sexaquark cosmology enforces that a large contribution to dark matter is only possible with a similarly large antisexaquark population. This population, however, would leave a stark annihilation signal in a detector such as Super-Kamiokande. I will summarize with how sexaquarks as a large component of the dark matter is incompatible with current observational data.

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