Scientific Series

Substantial astronomical observations have established that approximately 25% of the energy density of the universe is composed of cold non-baryonic dark matter, whose detection and characterization could be key to improving our understanding of the laws of physics. Over the past three decades, physicists have largely focused on searching for dark matter within the 10 GeV-1 TeV range (WIMPs), unfortunately without success.In this talk, we’ll discuss the experimental requirements when searching for dark matter throughout the mass range from 50meV- 500 MeV. We’ll also discuss recent R&D breakthroughs in athermal phonon sensor technology that will enable experiments that are being proposed using silicon, polar crystal and superfluid He as the detector material.

Our earlier findings indicate the violation of the 'volume simplicity' constraint in the current Spinfoam models (EPRL-FK-KKL). This result, and related problems in LQG, promted to revisit the metric/vielbein degrees of freedom in the classical Einstein-Cartan gravity. Notably, I address in detail what constitutes a 'geometry' and its 'group of motions' in such Poincare gauge theory. In a differential geometric scheme that I put forward the local translations are not broken but exact, and their relation to diffeomorphism transformations is clarified. The refined notion of a tensor takes into account the (relative) localization in spacetime, whereas the key concept of 'development' generalizes parallel transport (of vectors and points) to affine spaces. I advocate for this Cartan connection as the fundamental d.o.f. of the gravitational field, and discuss implications for discretization and quantization. Based on [1905.06931].

Subregion duality is an idea in holography which states that every subregion of the boundary theory has a corresponding subregion in the bulk theory, called the 'entanglement wedge', to which it is dual. In the classical limit of the gravity theory, we expect the fields in the entanglement wedge to permit a Hamiltonian description involving a phase space and Poisson brackets. In this talk, I will describe how this phase space arises from the point of view of the boundary theory. In particular, I will explain how it emerges from measurements of a certain quantum information-theoretic quantity known as the 'Uhlmann phase', in the boundary subregion.

In this talk I will discuss effective field theories for two classes of non-equilibrium systems, one far and one near equilibrium. The backbone of the approach is the Schwinger-Keldysh formalism, which is the natural starting point for doing field theory in non-equilibrium situations. In the first part of the talk I will present an effective response for topological driven (Floquet) systems, which are inherently far from equilibrium. As an example, I will discuss a chiral Floquet drive coupled to a background $U(1)$ field, which gives rise to a theta term in the response action, and show that this is independent of smooth deformations of the underlying system. In the second part, I will discuss an ongoing project using effective field theories for hydrodynamics. I will show that chiral diffusion for interacting systems in 1+1 dimensions, which may be relevant to edge transport in quantum Hall systems, has an infrared instability. I will then discuss the fate of this instability.

Many well-known correlations between dark matter and baryons exist on galactic scales. These can essentially be encompassed by a simple scaling relation between observed and baryonic accelerations, historically known as the Mass Discrepancy Acceleration Relation (MDAR). This relation has prompted many theories that attempt to explain the correlations by invoking additional fundamental forces on baryons. Since a collisionless cold dark matter (CDM) model is desirable on scales of clusters and above, the standard lore has been that a theory which reduces to the MDAR on galaxy scales but behaves like CDM on larger scales provides an excellent fit to data. However, this statement should be revised in light of recent results showing that a fundamental force that reproduces the MDAR is often challenged at accommodating Milky Way dynamics. In this study, we test this claim on the  example of Superfluid Dark Matter. We find that a standard CDM model is strongly preferred over a static superfluid profile.  This is due to the fact that the superfluid model over-predicts vertical accelerations, even while reproducing galactic rotation curves.  Our results establish an important criterion that any dark matter model must satisfy within the Milky Way.

In this talk, I will describe the framework of large D matrix models, which provides new limits for matrix models where the sum over planar graphs simplifies when D is large. The basic degrees of freedom are a set of D real matrices of size NxN which is invariant under O(D). These matrices can be naturally interpreted as a real tensor of rank three, making a compelling connection with tensor models. Furthermore, they have a natural interpretation in terms of D-brane constructions in string theory. I will present a way to define a large D scaling of the coupling constants such that the sum over Feynman graphs of fixed genus in matrix models admits a well-defined large D expansion. In particular, in the large D limit, the sum over planar graphs truncates to a tractable, yet non-trivial, sum over generalized melonic graphs. This family of graphs has been shown to display very interesting properties, especially in the case of quantum mechanical models such as the SYK model and SYK-like tensor models. If time allows, I will also explain how one can use the large D limit of matrix models to simplify the sum over all genera, which is notoriously divergent. 

Absolute Gromov-Witten theory is known to have many nice structural properties, such as quantum cohomology, WDVV equation, Givental's formalism, mirror theorem, CohFT etc.. In this talk, I will explain how to obtain parallel structures for relative Gromov-Witten theory via the relation between relative and orbifold Gromov-Witten invariants. This is based on joint works with Honglu Fan, Hsian-Hua Tseng and Longting Wu. 

This talk is a progress report on ongoing research. I will explain what resource theories have to do with real algebraic geometry, and then present a preliminary result in real algebraic geometry which can be interpreted as a theorem on asymptotic and catalytic resource orderings.

It reproves the known criterion for asymptotic and catalytic majorization in terms of Rényi entropies, and generalizes it to any resource theory which satisfies a mild boundedness hypothesis. I will sketch the case of matrix majorization as an example.

According to the Asymptotic Safety conjecture, a (non-perturbatively)
renormalizable quantum field theory of gravity could be constructed
based on the existence of a non-trivial fixed point of the
renormalization group flow.
The existence of this fixed point can be established, e.g., via the
non-perturbative methods of the functional renormalization group (FRG).
In practice, the use of the FRG methods requires to work within
truncations of the gravitational action, and higher-derivative operators
naturally lead to the presence of several poles in the propagator. The
question is whether these poles represent a real problem for the
unitarity of the theory.

Using QED as a working example, in this talk I will discuss some aspects
of non-perturbative unitarity in Quantum Field Theory. I will show that
the inclusion of quantum effects at all scales is of crucial importance
to assess unitarity of field theories. In particular, poles appearing in
truncations of the action could correspond to fake degrees of freedom of
the theory. Possible conditions to determine, within truncations,
whether a pole represents a fake or a genuine degree of freedom of the
theory will also be discussed.

Cosmological simulations of galaxy formation have evolved significantly over the last years.
In my talk I will describe recent efforts to model the large-scale distribution
of galaxies with cosmological hydrodynamics simulations. I will focus on the
Illustris simulation, and our new simulation campaign, the IllustrisTNG
project. After demonstrating the success of these simulations in terms of
reproducing an enormous amount of observational data, I will also talk about
their limitations and directions for further improvements over the next couple
of years.

The first part of this talk will introduce generalized Jordan–Wigner
transformation on arbitrary triangulation of any simply connected
manifold in 2d, 3d and general dimensions. This gives a duality
between all fermionic systems and a new class of Z2 lattice gauge
theories. This map preserves the locality and has an explicit
dependence on the second Stiefel–Whitney class and a choice of spin
structure on the manifold. In the Euclidean picture, this mapping is
exactly equivalent to introducing topological terms (Chern-Simon term
in 2d or the Steenrod square term in general) to the Euclidean action.
We can increase the code distance of this mapping, such that this
mapping can correct all 1-qubit and 2-qubits errors and is useful for
the simulation of fermions on the quantum computer. The second part of
my talk is about SPT phases. By the boson-fermion duality, we are able
to show the equivalent between any supercohomology fermionic SPT and
some higher-group bosonic SPT phases. Particularly in (3+1)D, we have
constructed a unitary quantum circuit for any supercohomology
fermionic SPT state with gapped boundary construction. This fermionic
SPT state is derived by gauging higher-form Z2 symmetry in the
higher-group bosonic SPT and apply the boson-fermion duality.

A superoscillatory function is a bandlimited function that, on some interval, oscillates faster than the highest frequency component shown in the function's Fourier transform. Superoscillations can be arbitrarily fast and of arbitrarily long duration but come at the expense of requiring a correspondingly large dynamic range. I will review how superoscillatory wave forms can be constructed and I will discuss the unusual behavior of wave functions that superoscillate. For example, they can describe particles that automatically strongly accelerate when passing through a slit. A postselected stream of them represents a ray that cools the slit walls, raising foundational and thermodynamic questions. Superoscillatory wave forms are already being used for practical applications such as spatial resolution beyond the diffraction limit.