High Energy Physics

Since the Higgs, the LHC has offered no discoveries despite a sweeping hunt for new resonances. However, many well-motivated new physics models would not turn up in resonance searches, but could instead be uncovered in existing and forthcoming LHC data, by searching for novel angular distributions of Standard Model particles. I will show that in the upcoming years at the LHC, (1) through radiative corrections, dark matter can turn up in dilepton scattering angles in the parametric regions where it would elude conventional missing energy-based searches; the scattering patterns can reveal dark matter's mass, self-conjugation property, spin, and chirality of interactions, (2) through tree level interference, leptoquarks may emerge in dilepton scattering angles long before they would in dedicated direct searches; these angular measurements would also overtake the excellent sensitivities of low-energy precision measurements of atomic parity violation, and (3) Higgs Yukawa couplings to light quarks of the size of the bottom Yukawa could be measured using the Higgstrahlung scattering angle.

The talk will review the computation of the three point function of gauge-invariant operators in the planar N=4 SYM theory using integrability-based methods. The structure constant can be decomposed, as proposed by Basso, Komatsu and Vieira, in terms of two form-factor-like objects (hexagons). The multiple sums and integrals implied by the hexagon decomposition can be performed in the large-charge limit, and be compared to the results obtained by semiclassics. I will discuss a method to perform these sums and the contributions currently accessible by this approach.

I will introduce the spectral function method in the context of conformal bootstrap. I will discuss some applications of this method in two dimensions: (1) substantial evidence for the conjecture that the only unitary c>1 CFT with Virasoro primaries of bounded spin is Liouville theory, (2) detailed modular constraints on the spectrum of small c CFTs, (3) spectral density of large c CFTs with large gap, in connection to the (non-)universality of BTZ black hole entropy.

Sub-GeV dark matter is a theoretically motivated but largely unexplored paradigm of dark matter. In this talk, I will discuss recent work on the direct detection of sub-GeV dark matter through dark matter-electron scattering. I will present some motivated models that can be probed with these techniques as well as projections for current and near-term noble liquid, semiconductor, and scintillator experiments. Finally, I will discuss some new techniques that may allow us to more robustly discriminate between dark matter signatures and background.