Talks

Though the observed CMB is at very low energy, it encodes ultra high-energy physics in spatial variations of the photon temperature and polarization fluctuations. This effect is believed to be dominated by the initial quantum state of the Universe. I will describe the first theoretical tools by which to construct such a state from fundamental physics. There are three specific observational effects this initial state will produce: a ringing signal in the power spectrum of quantum field fluctuations, an enfolded type of non-Gaussian fluctuations, and a calculable primordial gravitational wave background. We may soon be able to compare these predictions against experiment, allowing one to rule out classes of quantum gravity models. Now is the critical time to undertake such investigations, with a number of ongoing and planned experiments such as WMAP, Planck, and CMBPol poised to collect a wealth of precision data.

The gauge/gravity duality may give a nonperturbative formulation of superstring/M theory, and hence, if one can study the nonperturbative dynamics of the gauge theory, it would be useful to understand the nonperturbative aspects of superstring theory. Although researches in this direction were not successful for long time because of the notorious difficulties in lattice SUSY, however, recent progress made it possible; nonperturbative formulations free from the parameter fine-tuning were proposed, some of them are confirmed to work numerically, and nontrivial evidence for the validity of the gauge/gravity duality has been obtained. In these talks I review the state of the art in this field. I start with reviewing basics of the Monte-Carlo. Then I explain how to put supersymmetric theories on computer and show actual numerical results. 1st talk : basics of Monte-Carlo simulation. 2nd talk : 1d SYM (matrix quantum mechanics). 3rd talk : how to put 2d, 3d and 4d SYM on computer. In the talks I concentrate on basic ideas and omit technical details (e.g. algorithms to accelerate simulations). They will be explained after the talks if people are interested in. References: 1st talk : standard textbooks e.g. Heinz J. Rothe, "Lattice Gauge Theories: An Introduction", Third Edition, World Scientific. 2nd talk : 0706.1647 [hep-lat], 0707.4454 [hep-th], 0811.2081 [hep-th], 0811.3102 [hep-th], 0911.1623 [hep-th], 1012.2913 [hep-th]. 3rd talk : hep-lat/0302017, hep-lat/0311021, 1010.2948 [hep-lat] (2d SYM); hep-th/0211139 (3d SYM); 1004.5513 [hep-lat], 1009.0901 [hep-lat] (4d SYM)

Recently, several neutrino physics has witnessed an accumulation of anomalous results. In the first part of this talk, we will discuss the tension that the MINOS experiments has seen between oscillations of neutrinos and anti-neutrinos. We will show that, phenomenologically, this tension can be explained if neutrinos are hypothesized to have new interactions mediated by higher-dimensional operators, but we will also show that problems arise when one attempts to embed these operators into renormalizable models. In the second part of the talk, we will address several results hinting at the existence of sterile neutrinos. We will present results from a global fit to worldwide neutrino oscillation data, and will show that one sterile neutrino is not enough to reconcile all data sets, and that 5-neutrino models, while being in much better agreement with the data, still have some tension.

Unexplained hierarchies and the quest for naturalness have driven model-building efforts in particle physics and cosmology for the past few decades. I will speak about various approaches to problems of 'unnatural' fine tunings, in the context of supersymmetry, inflation and LHC phenomenology respectively.

Hubeny identified a scenario in which a charged particle falling toward a near-extreme Reissner-Nordstrom black hole can penetrate the black hole and drive it beyond the extremal limit, thereby giving rise to an apparent violation of cosmic censorship. A version of this scenario, relevant to a Kerr black hole and involving a particle with orbital and/or spin angular momentum, was recently examined by Jacobson and Sotiriou (following up on earlier work by Hod); here also the black hole is driven beyond the extremal limit. The Hubeny analysis was inconclusive, however, because in her scenario the particle crosses the horizon with a near-vanishing acceleration; the test-body acceleration is of the same order of magnitude as the acceleration produced by the particle's own electromagnetic self-force, which was not fully incorporated in the analysis. In this talk we report on our computation of the electromagnetic self-force acting on a charged particle falling radially toward a Reissner-Nordstrom black hole, and we reveal whether the self-force acts as a cosmic censor by preventing the particle from reaching the event horizon.

We discuss the calculation of higher loop contributions to the anomalous dimensions of operators in N=6 Superconformal Chern-Simons theories. These lead us to conjecture the form of an interpolating function of the 't Hooft coupling that is not determined by integrability.

This is a geometric tutorial about straight and twisted vectors and forms (ie, de Rham currents) leading to some wild thoughts about the EM field as a *thing*, ie with properties similar to a piece of matter; and to some even wilder thoughts about a metric-free GR.

Recently, emergent phenomena have started to attract more attention. Instead of assuming a symmetric world, one begins with a chaotic one. In this talk, I will describe this picture, discuss the main constraints on emergence, and then present a few phenomenological procedures that can be implemented to study the emergent phenomena.

This talk presents sufficient conditions for equilibration and thermalization of subsystems within closed many body quantum systems. That is, we identify when the local properties of the equilibrium state resemble those of a thermal state. With this aim, the recent progress in this field is reviewed and we introduce a novel perturbation technique for a realistic weak coupling between the subsystem and its environment. Unlike the standard perturbation theory, our technique is robust in the thermodynamic limit. Based on our thermalization results, we construct a simple and fully general quantum algorithm for preparing Gibbs states with a certified runtime and error bonds.

In my talk I raise the question of the fundamental limits to the size of thermal machines - refrigerators, heat pumps and work producing engines - and I will present the smallest possible ones. I will also discuss the issue of a possible complementarity between size and efficiency and show that even the smallest machines could be maximally efficient. Finally I will present a new point of view over what is work and what do thermal machines actually do.