High Energy Physics

Repeated null-results at dark matter experiments targeted at WIMP masses, have resulted in the spotlight shifting to lighter dark matter and more exotic WIMP candidates. In this talk I shall present the rich level structure of molecules and nuclei as a tool to explore MeV scale dark matter and dark forces. I will also present a novel detector concept that supplies energy to dark matter, thus accessing inelastic dark matter parameter space.

In this talk I will consider the S-matrix bootstrap of four dimensional scattering amplitudes with O(3) symmetry and no bound states and apply the formalism to pion physics. I will discuss the remarkable location where QCD seems to lie in the multi-dimensional space of zeros, scattering length and resonance mass values, based on various experimental and theoretical expectations.

We consider implications of superrotations as an asymptotic symmetry of asymptotically flat spacetimes.  Beginning with a review of the rich structure of interconnections between soft theorems, asymptotic symmetries, and                 memory effects, we describe the superrotation iteration.  The subleading soft graviton theorem can be cast as a Ward identity for this asymptotic symmetry in 4D, and also as one for the stress tensor of a putative CFT2.  We detail the change of scattering basis motivated by this asymptotic symmetry and discuss recent progress.

Among the many candidates proposed to explain the nature of Dark Matter, WIMPs have been the most supported in the last decades, because of their success in a natural explanation of the current Dark Matter abundance and their ubiquitous presence in models addressing the hierarchy problem.
Other candidates that have been attracting some attention recently are Primordial Black Holes, which would have formed in the early history of the universe.
In my talk I will touch on both frameworks for the explanation of Dark Matter.
As for WIMP candidates, I will discuss the interplay between their experimental searches and theoretical frameworks. On the side of Effective Field Theories, I propose a method to use them consistently for the recast of collider searches. On the side of simplified models, in the presence of apparent gauge anomalies at low energies I highlight the enhanced reach of indirect searches.
In the last part I will illustrate a model for the generation of PBHs relying on a feature already present in the Standard Model, the metastability of the Higgs vacuum. Another signature of this remarkable property of the SM could be the generation of a background of gravitational waves.
The observation of either of these signatures would represent a spectacular confirmation of the metastability of the Higgs vacuum.

In gauge theories, there is an inherent tension between locality and gauge invariance.   This is precisely expressed by the failure to factorize the physical Hilbert space into local tensor products.   The extended Hilbert space offers a resolution to this problem by embedding physical states into a larger Hilbert space containing gauge variant degrees of freedom.  For two dimensional TQFT's, we show how this extension fits inside the framework of extended quantum field theory, as described by the Moore-Segal axioms.  These are sewing axioms that impose a sort of spacetime covariance for the extended Hilbert space.   For the case of two-dimensional Yang Mills and it's string theory dual, we show how this framework leads to exact calculations of multi-interval modular flow,  ,negativity, and entanglement entropy.  Moreover, we given an axiomatic formulation of the "entanglement brane", which nicely compliments the worldsheet description given in previous work.

We perform a full (3+1)-dimensional numerical simulation of the axion field around the QCD epoch. Our aim is to fully resolve large dynamical non-linear effects in the inhomogenous axion field. These effects are important as they lead to large overdensities in the field at late times. Those overdensities will eventually evolve into axion minicluster, which have various phenomenological implications like microlensing events. It is therefore important to have a reliable estimate of the number of overdensities and their mass relation.

The two-point functions <O^n(x) Obar^n(y)> for generator O of Coulomb branch chiral rings in D=4 N=2 SCFT will be determined universally to all orders in 1/n by the theory's a-anomaly.
The calculation will be done using the method of large-charge expansion presented in [1706.05743]; the absence of F-terms in the (R-charge)^(-1) expansion of the effective action ensures this universality.
I will also comment on the non-universal and non-perturbative corrections to the two-point functions whose leading piece was numerically shown to go as O(exp(-sqrt(n))).  

After the detection of black hole and neutron star binary mergers at LIGO/Virgo, gravitational wave becomes a new observational channel that we didn't have access to years ago.

It is an interesting question to ask what kind of new particle physics this channel can probe.

To answer this question, one needs to fill the gap between the scales of the astrophysical processes and the fundamental structures.

In this talk, I will demonstrate a few ways of extracting particle physics information directly from binary merger events of neutron stars and boson stars, and using this information to constrain well motivated dark sectors, including dark gauge boson and axion like particles.

An outline of future directions will also be discussed.

Recent progress in determining scattering phase shifts, and hence, resonance properties from lattice QCD in finite volumes is presented.

The relationship between finite-volume stationary-state energies and the two-particle scattering K-matrix is discussed.

Details of the Monte Carlo computations of the finite-volume two-particle energies are described.

Results for pion-pion, kaon-pion, and nucleon-pion scattering are presented.

Most current dark matter detection strategies, including both direct and indirect efforts, are based on the assumption that the galactic dark matter number density is quite high, allowing for the detection of rare scattering events. Such a paradigm arises naturally if the dark matter self-interactions are weak. However, strong interactions within the dark sector can give rise to large composite objects, whose detection requires a different experimental paradigm. We call these object Dark Blobs. In such theories, the energy transfer due to a single collision with a Standard Model particle tends to be small, below the energy threshold of many nuclear recoil experiments. Fortunately, due to their exponentially large composite nature, the interactions between these objects and a terrestrial detector can be coherently enhanced. Therefore, while the effect on a single probe is small, the large collective effect can be quite dramatic and, importantly, above experimental thresholds. In this talk, I will briefly motivate the early Universe formation of certain types of Dark Blobs and then focus on multiple detection avenues for these objects.

In this talk I will review the results of recent work in collaboration with  Cecilia De Fazio, Benjamin Doyon and István M. Szécsényi. We studied the entanglement of excited states consisting of a finite number of particle excitations. More precisely, we studied the difference between the entanglement entropy of such states and that of the ground state in a simple bi-partition of a quantum system, where both the size of the system and of the bi-partition are infinite, but their ratio is finite. We originally studied this problem in massive 1+1 dimensional QFTs where analytic computations were possible. We have found the results to apply more widely, including to higher dimensional free theories. In all cases we find that the increment of entanglement is a simple function of the ratio between region's and system's size only. Such function, turns out to be exactly the entanglement of a qubit state where the coefficients of the state are simply associated with the probabilities of particles being localised in one or the other part of the bi-partition. In this talk I will describe the results in some detail and discuss their domain of applicability. I will also highlight the main QFT techniques that we have used in order to obtain them analytically and  present some numerical data.