High Energy Physics

Hawking famously observed that the formation and evaporation of black holes appears to violate the unitary evolution of quantum mechanics. Nonetheless, it has been recently discovered that a signature of unitarity, namely the "Page curve" describing the evolution of entropy, can be recovered from semiclassical gravity. This result relies on "replica wormholes" appearing in the gravitational path integral, which are examples of spacetime wormholes studied more than 30 years ago and related to interactions with closed "baby" universes. I will discuss the connection between these new and old ideas and the consequences for the black hole information problem. A central lesson is that a Hilbert space in quantum gravity can be dramatically modified by nonperturbative topology-changing processes.

We compute the partition function of 2D Jackiw-Teitelboim (JT) gravity at finite cutoff in two ways: (i) via an exact evaluation of the Wheeler-DeWitt wave-functional in radial quantization and (ii) through a direct computation of the Euclidean path integral. Both methods deal with Dirichlet boundary conditions for the metric and the dilaton. In the first approach, the radial wavefunctionals are found by reducing the constraint equations to two first order functional derivative equations that can be solved exactly, including factor ordering. In the second approach we perform the path integral exactly when summing over surfaces with disk topology, to all orders in perturbation theory in the cutoff. Both results precisely match the recently derived partition function in the Schwarzian theory deformed by an operator analogous to the TT¯ deformation in 2D CFTs. This equality can be seen as concrete evidence for the proposed holographic interpretation of the TT¯ deformation as the movement of the AdS boundary to a finite radial distance in the bulk.

Light dark photons are subject to various plasma effects, such as Debye screening and resonant oscillations, which can lead to a more complex cosmological evolution than is experienced by conventional cold dark matter candidates. Maintaining a consistent history of dark photon dark matter requires ensuring that the super-thermal abundance present in the early Universe (i) does not deviate significantly after the formation of the CMB, and (ii) does not excessively leak into the Standard Model plasma after BBN. In this talk, I will clarify the roles of resonant and non-resonant absorption and address some implications of plasma inhomogeneities on resonant transitions.

The information paradox can be realized in two-dimensional models of gravity. In this setting, we show that the large discrepancy between the von Neumann entropy as calculated by Hawking and the requirement of unitarity is fixed by including new saddles in the gravitational path integral. These saddles arise in the replica method as wormholes connecting different copies of the black hole. We will discuss their appearance both in asymptotically AdS and asymptotically flat theories of gravity.

In this talk I will discuss ongoing efforts at UChicago to explore matter made of light. I will begin with a broad introduction to the challenges associated with making matter from photons, focusing specifically on (1) how to trap photons and imbue them with synthetic mass and charge; (2) how to induce photons to collide with one another; and (3) how to drive photons to order, by cooling or otherwise. I will then provide as examples two state-of-the-art photonic quantum matter platforms: microwave photons coupled to superconducting resonators and transmon qubits, and optical photons trapped in multimode optical cavities and made to interact through Rydberg-dressing. In each case I will describe a synthetic material created in that platform: a Mott insulator of microwave photons, stabilized by coupling to an engineered, non-Markovian reservoir, and a Laughlin molecule of optical photons prepared by scattering photons through the optical cavity. Indeed, building materials photon-by-photon will provide us with a unique opportunity to learn what all of the above words mean, and why they are important for quantum-materials science. Finally, I will conclude with my view of the broad prospects of photonic matter in particular, and of synthetic matter more generally.

We look at the interior operator reconstruction from the point of view of Petz map and study its complexity. We show that Petz maps can be written as precursors under the condition of perfect recovery. When we have the entire boundary system its complexity is related to the volume / action of the wormhole from the bulk operator to the boundary. When we only have access to part of the system, Python's lunch appears and its restricted complexity depends exponentially on the size of the subsystem one loses access to.

I describe a novel way to produce states associated to geodesic motion for classical particles in the bulk of AdS that arise from particular operator insertions at the boundary

at a fixed time. When extended to black hole setups, one can understand how to map back the geometric information of the geodesics back to 

the properties of these operators. In particular, the presence of stable circular orbits in global AdS are analyzed. The classical Innermost Stable Circular Orbit 

(ISCO) play an important role separating metastable state excitations from those that quickly  fall in the horizon of  black hole. In the dual CFT, this metastability effect must be a non-perturbative effect due to the curvature on the boundary.

Historically, new particles and forces in the Standard Model have most often revealed themselves at high-energy particle colliders. Certain phenomena beyond the Standard Model, however, are best studied by using carefully designed low-energy precision measurements, or via their imprints on astrophysical and cosmological observables. In this talk, I will provide a concise overview of some of the new experiments and searches devised to look for new physics beyond the Standard Model. In particular, I will discuss recent developments in the new experimental and theoretical program of cosmological collider physics and how we can use the cosmological collider as a tool to study the structure of the Higgs potential at very high energies.