Scientific Series

Jets of hadrons produced at high-energy colliders provide experimental access to the dynamics of asymptotically free quarks and gluons and their confinement into hadrons. Motivated by recent developments in conformal field theory, we show that questions of interest in collider physics can be reformulated as the study of correlation functions of a specific class of light-ray operators and their associated operator product expansion (OPE). We show that multi-point correlation functions of these operators can be measured in real collider data, allowing us to experimentally verify the scaling properties associated with the OPE, and providing new insights into the dynamics of the confinement transition.

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Carrollian holography aims to express gravity in asymptotically flat space-time in terms of a dual Carrollian CFT living at null infinity. In this talk, I will review some aspects of Carrollian holography and argue that this approach is naturally related to the AdS/CFT correspondence via a flat limit procedure. I will then introduce the notion of Carrollian amplitude, which allows to encode massless scattering amplitudes into boundary correlators, and explain its connection to celestial amplitudes. Finally, I will present recent results concerning Carrollian OPEs and deduce how soft symmetries act at null infinity.

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The theory of General Relativity has successfully passed a large number of observational tests. The theory has been extensively tested in the weak-field regime with experiments in the Solar System and observations of binary pulsars. The past 7-8 years have seen significant advancements in the study of the strong-field regime, which can now be tested with gravitational waves, X-ray data, and mm Very Long Baseline Interferometry observations. In my talk, I will summarize the state-of-the-art of the tests of General Relativity with black hole X-ray data, discussing its recent progress and future developments.

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In a complete theory of gravity we expect space-time singularities to be regularized by quantum effects. From this point of view, we have two possible regular alternatives to singular black holes (BHs) to describe the ultracompact objects that we saw in our universe: regular black holes and horizonless compact objects. I will talk about the possible structures of these black hole mimickers and the gravitational waves ringdown signal that we expect from their coalescence. In particular I will focus on the deviations in the spectrum of QNMs with respect to singular BHs, their possible detectability and the structure of echoes when backreaction effects are taken into account.

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I will summarize recent progress in uncovering the analytic structure of scattering amplitudes. The overarching theme will be exploiting new intricate ways of analytically continuing time, extending beyond the Wick rotation. I will highlight a broad range of applications: from high-precision calculations in particle physics, through computations of gravitational waves, to formal topics in the scattering of strings.

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I will talk about the boundary vertex operator algebra of topologically twisted 3d N=4 rank-zero SCFTs. The latter is recently introduced family of N=4 SCFTs with zero-dimensional Higgs and Coulomb branches, which are expected to support rational VOAs at the boundary. I will discuss the construction of the simplest class of rank-zero SCFTs T_r, and argue that they admit the simple affine VOAs L_r(osp(1|2)) at their boundary. In the simplest case, this leads to a physical realization of a novel level-rank duality between L_1(osp(1|2)) and the Virasoro minimal model M(2,5).

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While the standard $\Lambda$CDM model provides an astonishing fit to cosmological data, there is a 4-6 $\sigma$ tension in the Hubble constant, $H_0$, between the value inferred from early-Universe observables, Planck CMB anisotropy spectra, and the value determined by local measurements from SH0ES collaboration using Type 1a supernovae calibrated with Cepheid variables. As an effort to solve this tension, we develop a method of searching for data-driven solutions to the Hubble tension given cosmological dataset, based on the standard Fisher bias formalism. Taking as proof of principle the case of a time-varying electron mass, and focusing first on Planck CMB data, we demonstrate a modified recombination can solve the Hubble tension and lower $S_8$ to better match weak lensing measurements. Once baryonic acoustic oscillation and uncalibrated supernovae data are included, it is not possible to fully solve the tension with perturbative modifications to recombination. The method we develop in this work can be a useful tool to search for many other possible extensions to the $\Lambda$CDM model, and is expected to inspire a model-building effort from the cosmology and particle physics community.

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In this work, drawing inspiration from the type of noise present in real hardware, we study the output distribution of random quantum circuits under practical non-unital noise sources with constant noise rates. We show that even in the presence of unital sources like the depolarizing channel, the distribution, under the combined noise
channel, never resembles a maximally entropic distribution at any depth. To show this, we prove that the output distribution of such circuits never anticoncentrates — meaning it is never too "flat" — regardless of the depth of the circuit. This is in stark contrast to the behavior of noiseless random quantum circuits or those with only unital noise, both
of which anticoncentrate at sufficiently large depths. As consequences, our results have interesting algorithmic implications on both the hardness and easiness of noisy random circuit sampling, since anticoncentration is a critical property exploited by both state-of-the-art classical hardness and easiness results. This talk is based on arXiv:2306.16659.

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The existence of fermionic compact objects, such as neutron stars, is supported by a plethora of observational evidence — an intriguing idea is whether one can construct stars made up of the bosonic counterparts. Such theoretical objects are called boson stars, proposed to make up a fraction of the dark matter in our Universe and claimed to be promising horizonless black hole mimickers. In this talk I will discuss the state-of-the-art of numerical evolutions of boson star models in spherical symmetry. In particular, I will discuss how improper initial data construction can lead to spurious physical effects in the evolution of boson star mergers and introduce methods, necessary to remedy such spurious features. I will present our results on boson star head-on collisions of various mass ratios, highlighting the differences from the black hole mergers. Lastly, I will discuss our recent results on the high-precision numerical relativity simulations of quasi-circular boson star inspirals in pursuit of understanding the implications of boson star signatures on the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observations.

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In this talk I will show how the gravitational potentials generated by ultralight dark matter halos interact with gravitational waves, resonantly amplifying them. Significant amplifications can be achieved in dense dark matter environments, where the Floquet exponent is increased. The frequency of the amplified gravitational wave is equal to the axion mass when one requires resonance in the first band. For some masses considered, the gravitational wave frequencies fall within the Pulsar Timing Array range, representing an interesting possibility to test ultralight axions as dark matter candidates.

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The sexaquark, a hypothetical stable and neutral six-quark state, has been recently proposed as a dark matter candidate. Here, I argue it is very unlikely sexaquarks could consistently compose more than a billionth of the dark matter abundance for a wide range of scattering cross sections and annihilation rates. To draw these conclusions, I will connect several topics, including the sexaquark freeze-out abundance, dark matter direct detection constraints, neutrino experiments, and accumulation mechanisms for sexaquarks in the Earth. I will show how the sexaquark cosmology enforces that a large contribution to dark matter is only possible with a similarly large antisexaquark population. This population, however, would leave a stark annihilation signal in a detector such as Super-Kamiokande. I will summarize with how sexaquarks as a large component of the dark matter is incompatible with current observational data.

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