Scientific Series

The development of virial mass estimates for the central black hole using one quasar spectrum has allowed a dramatic improvement in our understanding of supermassive black hole evolution. I will describe several new puzzles arising from the combination of virial masses with luminosity and redshift measurements, many of which are inconsistent with our current understanding of quasar evolution. I will also describe a new class of quasars that does not appear to fit easily into current models for quasar accretion.

The Standard Model is currently the theory which describes the most fundamental constituents of matter and the forces which govern their interactions. Since the start-up of the LHC accelerator, the ATLAS detector has collected sufficient data to allow tests of this theory at the smallest distance scales ever probed. The objective is to find significant deviations between the observed data and the Standard Model predictions, revealing the existence of new phenomena. For example, some theories in which the universe has more than 4 space-time dimensions predict that LHC collisions could produce gravitons - the particles responsible for the gravitational interaction. Such events would feature a single jet of hadronic particles in the detector and a large amount of

The study of the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background radiation over the past two decades has provided us with important information about the early universe. In particular, there is strong evidence that these anisotropies were generated long before the cosmic microwave radiation was emitted. The most commonly studied idea is that they originated as quantum fluctuations during a period of inflation. In addition to a spectrum of scalar perturbations consistent with the one that has been observed, inflation also predicts the presence of gravitational waves. These might be observable in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background. An observation of this signal would indicate that the inflaton must have traversed a super-Planckian distance. Realizing this in string theory has been challenging. I will describe the basic ingredients for a string theoretic setup in which the inflaton can move over a super-Planckian distance, leading to an observable gravitational wave signal within string theory. In addition to an observable tensor signal, the model may also lead to other interesting signatures which I will discuss such as modulations in the power spectrum of scalar perturbations, interesting shapes of non-Gaussianities, and possibly the formation of oscillons at the end of inflation.

Topology has many different manifestations in condensed matter physics. Real space examples include topological defects such as vortices, while momentum space ones include topological band structures and singularities in the electronic dispersion. In this talk, I will focus on two examples. The first is that of a vortex in a topological insulator that is doped into the superconducting state. This system, we find, has Majorana zero modes and thus, is a particularly simple way of obtaining these states. We derive general existence criteria for vortex Majorana modes and find that existing systems like Cu-doped Bi2Se3 fulfill them. In the process, we discover a rare example of a topological phase transition within a topological defect (the vortex) at the point when the criteria are violated. The second example is that of Weyl semimetals, which are three-dimensional analogs of graphene. Interestingly, the Dirac nodes here are topological objects in momentum space and are associated with peculiar Fermi-arc surface states. We discuss charge transport in these materials in the presence of interactions or disorder, and find encouraging agreement with existing experimental data.

A non-trivial test of the string vs. integrability correspondence is suggested: exact equivalence is established between strings in AdS4 x CP3 and the Gromov-Vieira all-loop integrable chain. To do that, the complete one- and two-magnon sector of each respective theory are calculated. In the single-magnon sector a direct perturbative one-loop calculation proves the validity of the dispersion law coming from the Bethe Ansatz, rather than of the one coming from the semiclassical analysis. In the two-magnon sector the full spectrum of the finite-size corrections has been calculated on the string side by us for the first time, that proves to be identical to the integrable chain spectrum. These results are interpreted by us as a confirmation of the exactness of the conjectured Gromov-Vieira Bethe Ansatz.

This talk will deal with a new connection formulation for higher-dimensional (Super)gravity theories and its applications. We will start by reviewing the basic ideas of loop quantum gravity. Next, the derivation of the new connection formulation will be discussed and it will be shown that the quantization methods developed in the context of loop quantum gravity apply. We comment on applications of the framework, focusing on making contact with String theory.

Cold atomic gases in optical lattices are emerging as excellent laboratories for testing models of strongly interacting particles in condensed matter physics. It is possible to tune the interactions, dimensionality, spin, statistics and a host of other variables in a completely disorder free environment. This has opened up unique possibilities of mapping out phase diagrams of quantum models and observing quantum phase transitions for the very first time. I will discuss some of the challenges in this field.

Dualities in physics are well known for their conceptual depth and quantitative predictive power in contexts where perturbation theory is unreliable. They are also remarkable for the staggering arrange of physical problems that exploit them, ranging from the study of confinement and unconventional phases in statistical mechanics and field theory to the unification of the string theory landscape. In this talk I will present a new, completely general approach to dualities that affords a systematic theory of quantum dualities and incorporates classical dualities as well into one unified framework. This new algebraic approach is remarkably successful in extending powerful duality techniques to the context of topologically quantum ordered systems and quantum information processing, and affords a compelling foundation for a general theory of exact dimensional reduction or holographic correspondences. Many systems however display only approximate dimensional reduction, and so I will present general inequalities -some of them based on entanglement- linking quantum systems of different spatial dimensionality. These inequalities provide bounds on the expectation values of observables and correlators that can enforce an effective dimensional reduction. In closing I will discuss some implications for (topological) quantum memories.

Critical theories of gravity are certain higher derivative theories in which parameters are so tuned as to eliminate massive excitations for the spin-2 field. Asymptotically AdS black hole entropy in these theories works out to be zero. We show that such theories arise naturally on the boundary of AdS in the form of counterterms. Such counterterms are derived by demanding cutoff independence of the Euclidean onshell action and black hole entropy. The resummed higher derivative action so obtained can be shown to be critical. Connections with log-CFTs will be discussed. For a specific choice of parameters, these theories turn out to be non-dynamical.

We propose models of symmetric WIMP dark matter in which dark matter annihilations generate the baryon asymmetry. We call this mechanism "WIMPy baryogenesis". This provides a dynamical connection between the late-time abundances of both dark matter and baryons. We construct explicit models of leptogenesis and baryogenesis at the weak scale, and find the "miraculous" result that, for order one couplings and weak scale masses for any new fields, the baryon asymmetry and dark matter relic density from WIMPy baryogenesis match the observed values. We also discuss implications for the LHC and dark matter detection experiments.

General relativity is a covariant theory of two transverse, traceless graviton degrees of freedom. According to a theorem of Hojman, Kuchar, and Teitelboim, modifications of general relativity must either introduce new degrees of freedom or violate the principle of general covariance. In my talk, I will discuss modifications of general relativity that retain the same number of gravitational degrees of freedom, and therefore explicitly break general covariance. Motivated by cosmology, the modifications of interest maintain spatial covariance. Demanding consistency of the theory forces the physical Hamiltonian density to obey an analogue of the renormalization group equation, which encodes the invariance of the theory under flow through the space of conformally equivalent spatial metrics.

Weak topological insulators have an even number of Dirac cones in their surface spectrum and are thought to be unstable to disorder, which leads to an insulating surface. Here we argue that the presence of disorder alone will not localize the surface states, rather, the presence of a time-reversal symmetric mass term is required for localization. Through numerical simulations, we show that in the absence of the mass term the surface always flow to a stable metallic phase and the conductivity obeys a one-parameter scaling relation, just as in the case of a strong topological insulator surface. With the inclusion of the mass, the transport properties of the surface of a weak topological insulator follow a two-parameter scaling form.