Scientific Series

Pulsar magnetospheres admit non-stationary vacuum gaps that are characterized by non-vanishing E•B. These gaps play an important role in plasma production and electromagnetic wave emission and, as I will discuss, are very efficient axion factories. The density of axions produced in a vacuum gap can be several orders of magnitude greater than the ambient dark matter density.  In the strong pulsar magnetic field, a fraction of these axions may convert to photons, giving rise to broadband radio signals. We show that dedicated observations of nearby pulsars with radio telescopes (FAST) and interferometers (SKA) can probe axion-photon couplings that are a few orders of magnitude lower than current astrophysical bounds.

Time at the Planck scale is an unexplored physical regime. It is widely believed that probing Planck time will remain for long an impossible task. Yet, we propose an experiment to test the discreteness of time at the Planck scale and show that it is not far removed from current technological capabilities.

The growing catalog of gravitational wave signals from binary black hole mergers has allowed us to probe the properties of these compact objects more precisely than ever before. In particular, binary black hole spin measurements have the potential to reveal the formation channels of these systems. An accurate and precise measurement of the spins of individual merging black holes is required to model their population-level distributions. In this talk, I will discuss recent work on the measurability of individual black hole spins focusing on those in heavy binaries. I will also present novel spin parameterizations that facilitate the study of specific features of binary black hole evolutionary histories. I will contextualize these individual spin measurements within the observed population of binary black holes and conclude by presenting the latest LIGO-Virgo results for the black hole spin distribution.

When a generic isolated quantum many-body system is driven out of equilibrium, its local properties are eventually described by the thermal ensemble. This picture can be intuitively explained by saying that, in the thermodynamic limit, the system acts as a bath for its own local subsystems. Despite the undeniable success of this paradigm, for interacting systems most of the evidence in support of it comes from numerical computations in relatively small systems, and there are very few exact results. The situation changed recently, with the discovery of certain solvable classes of local quantum circuits, in which finite-time dynamics is accessible and the subsystem-thermalization picture can be verified. After introducing the general picture I will present a recent example (arXiv:2012.12256) of a simple interacting integrable circuit, for which the finite-time dynamics can be exactly described, and the model can be shown to exhibit generic thermalization properties.

Non-gaussianity of primordial density perturbations can be sensitive to very heavy particles at the inflationary Hubble scale (H < 10^(13) GeV). However, the window of observability is often constrained to masses close to H. In this talk, I will discuss a mechanism (dubbed “chemical potential”) for heavy complex scalar fields that can extend this window to masses as large as 60H. The mechanism utilizes the large kinetic energy of the inflaton to enhance particle production, and can impart observable non-gaussianity, f_NL~ O(0.01-10). In the second part of the talk, I will discuss another mechanism where the distinct signature of a heavy field can be imprinted at the level of the power spectrum by violating scale-invariance. This can be achieved through the onset of classical oscillations of the heavy field during inflation, instead of quantum production. We consider the possibility of observing such a signal in the stochastic gravitational wave (GW) background originating from a first-order phase transition in a hidden sector. The signal can be observably large in the GW map while being completely hidden in the standard curvature perturbations such as those of the CMB.

Primordial gravitational waves have the potential to shed new light on the very early universe. In this talk I will discuss gravitational wave production in a variety of models beyond the simplest, single-field, scenarios and highlight some of their implications for testing inflation with interferometers.

Recent studies revealed that wormhole geometries play a central role in understanding quantum gravity. After disorder-averaging over random couplings, Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model has a collective field description of wormhole saddles. A recent paper by Saad, Shenker, Stanford, and Yao studied the SYK model with fixed couplings and found that the wormhole saddles persist, but that new saddles called “half-wormholes” also appear in the path-integral. 

In this talk, we introduce a “partially disorder-averaged SYK model” and study how these half-wormholes emerge as we gradually fix the coupling constants. This model has a real parameter that smoothly interpolates between the ordinary totally disorder-averaged SYK model and the totally fixed-coupling model. For the large N effective description, in addition to the usual bi-local collective fields, we also introduce a new additional set of local collective fields. These local fields can be understood as the “half” of the bi-local collective fields, and they represent the half-wormholes in the totally fixed-coupling limit. We found that the large N saddles of these local fields vanish in the total-disorder-averaged limit, while they develop non-trivial profiles as we gradually fix the coupling constants. This illuminates how the half-wormhole saddles emerge in the SYK model with fixed couplings.

Many modern materials feature a “Planckian metal”: a phase of electronic quantum matter without quasiparticle excitations, and relaxation in a time of order Planck's constant divided by the absolute temperature. I will review recent progress in understanding such metals using insights from the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model of many-particle quantum dynamics. I will also note connections to progress in understanding the quantum nature of black holes.

In absence of both experimental evidence for and a fully understood  theory of quantum gravity, the possibility that gravity might be  fundamentally classical presents an option to be considered. Such a  semiclassical theory also bears the potential to be part of an  objective explanation for the emergence of classical measurement outcomes. Nonetheless, the possibility is mostly disregarded based on the grounds of arguments of consistency. I will discuss these arguments, attempting to present the broader picture of the constraints that need to be dealt with in order to formulate consistent semiclassical models of gravity, and the implications this  has with regard to concrete proposals for theoretical models and 
experimental tests of semiclassical versus quantized gravity.

Zoom Link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/99590707415?pwd=MHFMZlhSMUdMbFFoMEFmQTIxSUhBQT09

In recent years, there has been a great deal of progress on ideas related to twisted supergravity, building on the definition given by Costello and Li. Much of what is explicitly known about these theories comes from the topological B-model, whose string field theory conjecturally produces the holomorphic twist of type IIB supergravity. Progress on eleven-dimensional supergravity has been hindered, in part, by the lack of such a worldsheet approach. I will discuss a rigorous computation of the twist of the free eleven-dimensional supergravity multiplet, as well as an interacting BV theory with this field content that passes a large  number of consistency checks. Surprisingly, the resulting holomorphic theory on flat space is closely related to the infinite-dimensional exceptional simple Lie superalgebra E(5,10). This is joint work with Surya Raghavendran and Brian Williams.

Zoom Link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/99622967785?pwd=YmlQWW1sNW1qS1FhQkV4NXFlY0Nsdz09

It has been a long-standing dream of twistor theorists to understand gravity without ever talking about gravitons in space-time. To this end, I will describe the recent discovery of a twistor action formulation of perturbative general relativity. This takes the form of a theory governing complex structure deformations on twistor space. It reduces to Plebanski's formulation of GR on performing the Penrose transform to space-time. Some promising applications include finding on-shell recursion relations like MHV rules for graviton scattering amplitudes, studying the quantum integrability of self-dual GR, etc.

Zoom Link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/99235001602?pwd=QVN6b2ZPbTM2SkFWNkxYTEhzd0tsdz09

Fast radio bursts (FRB's) are a recently discovered, poorly understood class of transient event, and understanding their origin has become a central problem in astrophysics. I will present FRB science results from CHIME, a new interferometric telescope at radio frequencies 400-800 MHz. In the 3 years since first light, CHIME has found ~20 times more FRB's than all other telescopes combined, including ~60 new repeating FRB's, the first repeating FRB with periodic activity, a giant pulse from a Galactic magnetar which may be an FRB in our own galaxy, and millisecond periodicity in FRB sub-pulses. These results were made possible by new algorithms which can be used to build radio telescopes orders of magnitude more powerful than CHIME. I will briefly describe two upcoming projects: outrigger telescopes for CHIME (starting 2022) and CHORD, a new telescope with ~10 times the CHIME mapping speed (starting 2024). 

Zoom Link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/93798160318?pwd=Z3ZlNTRNRXV5MkQ5cUJhU09sVFpOdz09