Talks

The axion is one of the most compelling new physics candidates, deriving many of its important properties from an approximate shift symmetry. In this talk, we will consider the general form of the axion coupling to photons in the presence of such a broken shift symmetry. We will show that the axion-photon in general becomes a non-linear monodromic function of the axion. The non-linearity is correlated with the axion mass and singularities in the axion-photon coupling are associated with cusps in the axion potential. We derive the general form of the axion-photon coupling for several examples including the QCD axion and show that there is a uniform general form for this monodromic function. The full non-linear profile of this coupling is phenomenologically relevant to the dynamics induced on axion domain walls/strings and other extended objects involving the axion.

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A Planck scale inflationary era—in a quantum gravity theory predicting discreteness of quantum geometry at the fundamental scale—produces the scale invariant spectrum of inhomogeneities with very small tensor-to-scalar ratio of perturbations and a hot big bang leading to a natural dark matter genesis scenario. In this talk I evoke the possibility that some of the major puzzles in cosmology could have an explanation rooted in quantum gravity.

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A 2-group is a categorical generalization of a group: it's a category with a multiplication operation which satisfies the usual group axioms only up to coherent isomorphisms. The isomorphism classes of its objects form an ordinary group, G. Given a 2-group G with underlying group G, we can similarly define a categorical generalization of the notion of principal bundles over a manifold (or stack) X, and obtain a bicategory Bun_G(X), living over the category Bun_G(X) of ordinary G-bundles on X. For G finite and X a Riemann surface, we prove that this gives a categorification of the Freed--Quinn line bundle, a mapping-class group equivariant line bundle on Bun_G(X) which plays an important role in Dijkgraaf--Witten theory (i.e. Chern--Simons theory for the finite group G). This talk is based on joint work with Daniel Berwick-Evans, Laura Murray, Apurva Nakade, and Emma Phillips.

I will not assume previous knowledge of 2-groups: I will provide a quick overview in the main talk, as well as a more detailed discussion during a pre-talk on Tuesday. 

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We define a map from an arbitrary quantum circuit to a local Hamiltonian whose ground state encodes the quantum computation. All previous maps relied on the Feynman-Kitaev construction, which introduces an ancillary ‘clock register’ to track the computational steps. Our construction, on the other hand, relies on injective tensor networks with associated parent Hamiltonians, avoiding the introduction of a clock register. This comes at the cost of the ground state containing only a noisy version of the quantum computation, with independent stochastic noise. We can remedy this - making our construction robust - by using quantum fault tolerance. In addition to the stochastic noise, we show that any state with energy density exponentially small in the circuit depth encodes a noisy version of the quantum computation with adversarial noise. We also show that any ‘combinatorial state’ with energy density polynomially small in depth encodes the quantum computation with adversarial noise. This serves as evidence that any state with energy density polynomially small in depth has a similar property. As an application, we give a new proof of the QMA-completeness of the local Hamiltonian problem (with logarithmic locality) and show that contracting injective tensor networks to additive error is BQP- hard. We also discuss the implication of our construction to the quantum PCP conjecture, combining with an observation that QMA verification can be done in logarithmic depth. Based on joint work with Anurag Anshu and Nikolas P. Breuckmann. (https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.16475)

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