High Energy Physics

Fractons are relatively new types of quasiparticles which have recently been inspiring activity within several branches of physics. I will offer some motivations and perspectives from quantum information theory, condensed matter physics, and high energy physics, focusing mainly on my work in the latter two subjects. This talk is primarily based on https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.08322 and a paper to appear shortly with Dominic Williamson.

Paleo-Detectors are natural minerals which record damage tracks from nuclear recoils over geological timescales. Minerals commonly found on Earth are as old as a billion years, and modern microscopy techniques may allow to reconstruct damage tracks with nanometer scale spatial resolution. Thus, paleo-detectors would constitute a technique to achieve keV recoil energy threshold with exposures comparable to a kiloton-scale conventional "real-time" detector. In this talk, I will discuss the potential of paleo-detectors for the direct detection of dark matter as well as for detecting low-energy neutrinos as are e.g. emitted by core collapse supernovae or our Sun. Furthermore, the age of the minerals provides the ability to look back across gigayear-timescales, giving paleo detectors the unique ability to probe changes in the cosmic ray rate or the galactic supernova rate over such timescales as well as dark matter substructure Earth might have encountered during its past few trips around our Galaxy.

I will present a class of recently computed holographic correlators between half-BPS operators in a vast array of SCFTs with non-maximal superconformal symmetry in dimensions d=3,4,5,6. Via AdS/CFT, these four-point functions are dual to gluon scattering amplitudes in AdS. Exploiting the notion of MRV limit I will show that, at tree level, all such correlators are completely fixed by symmetries and consistency conditions. Our results encode a wealth of novel CFT data and exhibit various emergent structures, including Parisi-Sourlas supersymmetry, hidden conformal symmetry and color-kinematics duality. This talk will be based on https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.15830.pdf.

A generic low-energy prediction of string theory is the existence of a large collection of axions, commonly known as a string axiverse. String axions can be distributed over many orders of magnitude in mass, and are expected to interact with one another through their joint potential. In this talk, I will show how non-linearities in this potential lead to a new type of resonant energy transfer between axions with nearby masses. This resonance generically transfers energy from axions with larger decay constants to those with smaller decay constants, leading to a multitude of signatures. These include enhanced direct detection prospects for a resonant pair comprising even a small subcomponent of dark matter, and boosted small-scale structure if the pair is the majority of DM. Near-future iterations of experiments such as ADMX and DM Radio will be sensitive to this scenario, as will astrophysical probes of DM substructure.

Despite years of research into dark matter, little has been done to explore models which are heavier than most WIMPs and lighter than most primordial black hole models, "blobs".  This parameter space is particularly difficult to probe, due to low number densities and low masses.  This talk will present a new model-independent mechanism that can be used to probe this difficult to reach region of dark matter parameter space.  Blobs form binaries which spin down and merge at high rates in the present and recent past.  The abundance of mergers can produce observable gravitational wave and electromagnetic signals.  I describe some of these unique signals and show how they already constrain parts of blob parameter space.

Zoom Link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/98024869740?pwd=eDlPSTB3UzhIcEVYVGNQakRHVUtFQT09

We investigate interactions between branes of various dimensions, both charged and uncharged, in some non-supersymmetric string models. These include the USp(32) and U(32) orientifolds of the type IIB and type 0B strings, as well as the SO(16) x SO(16) projection of the exceptional heterotic string. The resulting ten-dimensional spectra are free of tachyons and the combinations of branes that they contain give rise to rich and varied dynamics. We focus on potentials that describe their mutual interactions, both in the probe regime and in the string-amplitude regime, finding qualitative agreement despite the absence of supersymmetry and confirming the Weak Gravity Conjecture for charged branes.

We discuss aspects of the possible transition between small black holes and highly excited fundamental strings. We focus on the connection between black holes and the self gravitating string solution of Horowitz and Polchinski. This solution is interesting because it has non-zero entropy at the classical level and it is natural to suspect that it might be continuously connected to the black hole. Surprisingly, we find a different behavior for heterotic and type II cases. For the type II case we find an obstruction to the idea that the two are connected as classical solutions of string theory, while no such obstruction exists for the heterotic case. We further provide a linear sigma model analysis that suggests a continuous connection for the heterotic case. We also describe a solution generating transformation that produces a charged version of the self gravitating string. This provides a fuzzball-like construction of near extremal configurations carrying fundamental string momentum and winding charges. We provide formulas which are exact in α′ relating the thermodynamic properties of the charged and the uncharged solutions.

Zoom Link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/96056818482?pwd=cXdxSGRBTEI5N2d6Z21XbTF1Z1lLQT09

Pulsar magnetospheres admit non-stationary vacuum gaps that are characterized by non-vanishing E•B. These gaps play an important role in plasma production and electromagnetic wave emission and, as I will discuss, are very efficient axion factories. The density of axions produced in a vacuum gap can be several orders of magnitude greater than the ambient dark matter density.  In the strong pulsar magnetic field, a fraction of these axions may convert to photons, giving rise to broadband radio signals. We show that dedicated observations of nearby pulsars with radio telescopes (FAST) and interferometers (SKA) can probe axion-photon couplings that are a few orders of magnitude lower than current astrophysical bounds.

Non-gaussianity of primordial density perturbations can be sensitive to very heavy particles at the inflationary Hubble scale (H < 10^(13) GeV). However, the window of observability is often constrained to masses close to H. In this talk, I will discuss a mechanism (dubbed “chemical potential”) for heavy complex scalar fields that can extend this window to masses as large as 60H. The mechanism utilizes the large kinetic energy of the inflaton to enhance particle production, and can impart observable non-gaussianity, f_NL~ O(0.01-10). In the second part of the talk, I will discuss another mechanism where the distinct signature of a heavy field can be imprinted at the level of the power spectrum by violating scale-invariance. This can be achieved through the onset of classical oscillations of the heavy field during inflation, instead of quantum production. We consider the possibility of observing such a signal in the stochastic gravitational wave (GW) background originating from a first-order phase transition in a hidden sector. The signal can be observably large in the GW map while being completely hidden in the standard curvature perturbations such as those of the CMB.

Recent studies revealed that wormhole geometries play a central role in understanding quantum gravity. After disorder-averaging over random couplings, Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model has a collective field description of wormhole saddles. A recent paper by Saad, Shenker, Stanford, and Yao studied the SYK model with fixed couplings and found that the wormhole saddles persist, but that new saddles called “half-wormholes” also appear in the path-integral. 

In this talk, we introduce a “partially disorder-averaged SYK model” and study how these half-wormholes emerge as we gradually fix the coupling constants. This model has a real parameter that smoothly interpolates between the ordinary totally disorder-averaged SYK model and the totally fixed-coupling model. For the large N effective description, in addition to the usual bi-local collective fields, we also introduce a new additional set of local collective fields. These local fields can be understood as the “half” of the bi-local collective fields, and they represent the half-wormholes in the totally fixed-coupling limit. We found that the large N saddles of these local fields vanish in the total-disorder-averaged limit, while they develop non-trivial profiles as we gradually fix the coupling constants. This illuminates how the half-wormhole saddles emerge in the SYK model with fixed couplings.

We study the Lyapunov exponent in disordered quantum field theories. Generically the Lyapunov exponent can only be computed in isolated CFTs, and little is known about the way in which chaos grows as we deform the theory away from weak coupling. In this talk we describe families of theories in which the disorder coupling is an exactly marginal deformation, allowing us to follow the Lyapunov exponent from weak to strong coupling. We find surprising behaviors in some cases, including a discontinuous transition into chaos. We also describe a new method allowing for computations in nontrivial CFTs deformed by disorder at leading order in 1/N.

When a generic isolated quantum many-body system is driven out of equilibrium, its local properties are eventually described by the thermal ensemble. This picture can be intuitively explained by saying that, in the thermodynamic limit, the system acts as a bath for its own local subsystems. Despite the undeniable success of this paradigm, for interacting systems most of the evidence in support of it comes from numerical computations in relatively small systems, and there are very few exact results. In the talk, I will present an exact solution for the thermalization dynamics in the "Rule 54" cellular automaton, which can be considered the simplest interacting integrable model. After introducing the model and its tensor-network formulation, I will present the main tool of my analysis: the space-like formulation of the dynamics. Namely, I will recast the time-evolution of finite subsystems in terms of a transfer matrix in space and construct its fixed-points. I will conclude by showing two examples of physical applications: dynamics of local observables and entanglement growth. The talk is based on a recent series of papers: arXiv:2012.12256, arXiv:2104.04511, and arXiv:2104.04513.