Physics

I will begin by giving an overview of the current state of exoplanet
science, a field that has advanced tremendously in just the last few
years.  While specialized instrumentation and observational facilities
have provided the data driving this advance, the development and
application of statistical techniques to interpret this data have been
of critical importance.  These same tools are also at the core of all
data-driven science, and are thus applicable to many other fields of
astrophysics that will be acquiring increasingly large and rich
datasets in the coming years.  I will highlight a few examples of
particular interest to fundamental physics, including gravitational
wave observations, fast radio bursts, and cosmological surveys.

Gravitational waves, as predicted by Einstein one hundred years ago, have been detected by the advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in September last year. This finding marks the beginning of gravitational-wave astronomy. From now on, we are able to probe our universe using both long-range forces in nature. 

In the foreseeable future, the gravitational wave astronomy will be exponentially growing, with more detectors targeting gravitational waves at different frequencies and more events detected every week. This will provide us great opportunities but also impose challenges as well. In the first part of my talk, I will discuss the physics of gravitational wave detectors, emphasizing its basic principles and dominant noise sources, as well as ongoing efforts to improve detector sensitivity to fulfill the growing need. In the second half of my talk, I will discuss the astrophysics of gravitational-wave sources - especially compact sources such as black holes and neutron stars. I shall explain the spacetime dynamics, gravitational-wave emission during compact binary mergers and possible electromagnetic radiation from these compact objects. In the next few years with new gravitational-wave observations and possible electromagnetic counterpart measurements, we may dramatically improve our understandings on the astrophysics of these sources.

In any quantum field theory, the energy flux at a point of spacetime can be negative.  This would produce a repulsive gravitational field causing nearby light rays to defocus.  This in turn threatens to produce a variety of exotic phenomena including traversable wormholes, warp drives, time machines, and evasion of singularity theorems.  I will describe a new "quantum focusing conjecture" that prevents such pathologies.  In the flat spacetime limit it reduces to a novel lower bound on the energy density, which can be proven for several classes of field theories.

Precision atom interferometry is poised to become a powerful tool for discovery in fundamental physics.  Towards this end, I will describe recent, record-breaking atom interferometry experiments performed in a 10-meter drop tower that demonstrate long-lived quantum superposition states with macroscopic spatial separations.  The potential of this type of sensor is only beginning to be realized, and the ongoing march toward higher sensitivity can enable a diverse science impact, including laboratory tests of general relativity and the equivalence principle, searches for dark matter, probes of quantum mechanics, and detection of gravitational waves.  With the recent LIGO results, gravitational wave astronomy is particularly compelling since it provides a new window into the universe, collecting information about astrophysical systems and cosmology that is difficult or impossible to acquire by other methods.  Atom interferometric gravitational wave detection offers a number of advantages over traditional approaches, including simplified detector geometries, access to low frequencies that are complementary to LIGO, and substantially reduced antenna baselines.