Talks

I will talk on experiments and their interpretation done with Professor Lei Shu and her collaborators at Fudan University, Shanghai, and some tentative theory for the observations.  Thermodynamic and magnetic relaxation measurements in zero and finite magnetic field have been performed in two related almost triangular lattices of S=1/2 spins. One of these compounds is the purest of any of the potential spin-liquid compounds investigated so far. All its measured properties are extra-ordinary and characterized simply by just one parameter, the exchange energy obtained from susceptibility measurements. There are also colossal ultra-low energy singlet excitations. This may be the first characterization of the intrinsic properties of a class of spin-liquids.  An ansatz in which the excitations are calculated from a state of singlet-dimers interacting with excitations from other such singlets can be expressed in terms of Majoranas and gives properties similar to those observed.

In this talk I will discuss how the generators of radial conformal symmetries in Minkowski space-time are related to the generators of time evolution in conformal quantum mechanics. Within this correspondence I will show that in conformal quantum mechanics the state corresponding to the inertial vacuum for a conformally invariant field in Minkowski space-time has the structure of a thermofield double. The latter is built from a bipartite "vacuum state" corresponding to the ground state of the generators of hyperbolic time evolution, which cover only a portion of the time domain. When such generators are the ones of conformal Killing vectors mapping a causal diamond in itself and of dilations, the temperature of the thermofield double reproduces, respectively, the diamond temperature and the Milne temperature perceived by observers whose constant proper time hyper-surfaces define a hyperbolic slicing of the future cone. I will point out how this result indicates that, for conformal invariant fields, the fundamental ingredient for vacuum thermal effects in flat-space time is the non-eternal nature of the lifetime of observers rather than their acceleration.

Over forty detections of binary-black-hole mergers have been made during the first three observing runs of the LIGO and Virgo detectors. With this larger number of measurements of increasing accuracy, many of the remarkable predictions of general relativity for strongly curved, dynamical spacetimes will be able to be studied observationally. In this talk, I will discuss one class of strong-gravity phenomena, called gravitational-wave memory effects, which are predictions of general relativity that are most prominent in systems with high gravitational-wave luminosities, like binary black holes. Memory effects are characterized by changes in the gravitational-wave strain and its time integrals that persist after a transient signal passes by a detector. I will summarize the computation of these effects and the prospects for current and planned future gravitational-wave detectors to detect memory effects from black-hole mergers; in particular, there could be evidence for the memory effect in just a few years of advanced LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA data at their design sensitivities. I will also review what observing gravitational-wave memory effects can teach us about the symmetries and conserved quantities around isolated systems like binary-black-hole mergers. Time permitting, I will present results on memory effects in scalar-tensor theories of gravity and on subleading memory effects.

With gate error rates in multiple technologies now below the threshold required for fault-tolerant quantum computation, the major remaining obstacle to useful quantum computation is scaling, a challenge greatly amplified by the huge overhead imposed by quantum error correction itself. I’ll discuss a new fault-tolerant quantum computing scheme that can nonetheless be assembled from a small number of experimental components, potentially dramatically reducing the engineering challenges associated with building a large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computer. The architecture couples a single controllable qubit to a pair of delay lines which terminate in a detector. Below a threshold value for the error rate associated with the controllable qubit, the logical error rate decays exponentially with the square root of the delay line coherence time. The required gates can be implemented using existing technologies in quantum photonic and phononic systems. With continued incremental improvements in only a few components, we expect these systems to be promising candidates for demonstrating fault-tolerant quantum computation with comparatively modest experimental effort.

The remarkable properties of electrons moving through crystalline lattices continue to surprise us. Recently, electrons in artificial moiré lattices have emerged as an extraordinary new platform. The simplest such moiré material consists of a pair of graphene sheets twisted relative to one another. At a  "magic" angle of about 1 degree, a variety of phenomena, including strong-coupling superconductivity, is observed. In this talk, I will review this rapidly moving field and describe our theoretical ideas that invoke the geometry of quantum states and topological textures like skyrmions. Finally, I will explain how these insights indicate a promising new family of moiré materials, twisted trilayer graphene, which is currently under active experimental study.

This talk will be about entanglement entropy in empty 4-dimensional de Sitter spacetime of a non-conformal QFT [1]. I will first briefly describe the set-up and show how a hydrodynamic plasma dilutes and falls out of equilibrium due to expansion towards empty de Sitter spacetime. Interestingly, in the empty setting we can show that extremal surfaces in the holographic dual of spherical entangling regions on the boundary QFT probe beyond the dual event horizon if and only if the entangling region is larger than the cosmological horizon.

[1] Jorge Casalderrey-Solana, Christian Ecker, David Mateos and WS, Strong-coupling dynamics and entanglement in de Sitter space, 2011.08194

Ground-based cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments are now pushing into discovery space where new insights on inflation, dark matter, dark energy and neutrino physics will be obtained by unraveling signatures buried beneath the primordial fluctuations. I will present new results from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) that exemplify the power of high-resolution measurements of the microwave sky, including high-fidelity maps of dark matter through gravitational lensing. These maps set the stage for a robust measurement of the neutrino mass scale and hierarchy with upcoming ACT and Simons Observatory data. I will also discuss a new proposal for dramatically improving the sensitivity to primordial non-Gaussianity using measurements of the cosmic velocity field, and sketch a path towards using this technique to detect or rule out multi-field inflation using a combination of upcoming CMB data from the Simons Observatory and optical galaxy data from the Vera Rubin Observatory.

Recently, a new class of kagomé metals, with chemical formula AV3Sb5, where A = K, Rb, or Cs, have emerged as an exciting realization of quasi-2D correlated metals with hexagonal symmetry. These materials have been shown to display several electronic orders setting in through thermodynamic phase transitions: multi-component (“3Q”) hexagonal charge density wave (CDW) order below a Tc≈90K, andsuperconductivity with critical temperature of 2.5K or smaller, and some indications of nematicity and one-dimensional charge order in the normal and superconducting states. Other experiments show a strong anomalous Hall effect, suggesting possible topological physics.  I will discuss a theory of these phenomena based in part on strong interactions between electrons at saddle points, as well as ideas related to different competing density wave orders.

We are experimentally investigating possible departures from the standard quantum mechanics’  predictions at the Gran Sasso underground laboratory in Italy. In particular, with radiation detectors we are searching signals predicted by the collapse models (spontaneous emission of radiation) which were proposed to solve the “measurement problem” in quantum physics and signals coming from a possible violation of the Pauli Exclusion Principle. 

I shall discuss our recent results published in Nature Physics under the title “Underground test of gravity-related wave function collapse”, where we ruled out the natural parameter-free version of the gravity-related collapse model.  I shall then present more generic results on testing CSL (Continuous Spontaneous Localization) collapse models and discuss future perspectives.

Finally, I shall briefly present the VIP experiment with which we look for possible violations of the Pauli Exclusion Principle by searching for “impossible” atomic transitions and comment the impact of this research in relation to Quantum Gravity models.

 

Core-Collapse Supernovae are a fantastic laboratory to study fundamental physics.  The messengers from the core, neutrino and gravitational waves, carry a wealth of information about the dynamics, thermodynamics, underlying physics, and structure of massive stars at the end of their lives.  In this talk, I will discuss some of the ways we can use supernovae to probe this physics.  From quark-hadron phase transitions emitting unique gravitational wave and neutrino signals, to neutrinos telling us precise information about the distance to and progenitor mass (!) of galactic supernovae, even before the optical signal is emitted.  I will also talk about current efforts to model the population of core-collapse supernovae using parameterized 1D models.