Talks

In some of the planet's most extreme environments scientists are constructing enormous detectors to study the very rare interactions produced by neutrinos. In particular, at South Pole Station Antarctica more than a cubic kilometer of the deep glacial ice has been instrumented to construct the world's largest neutrino detector to date: the IceCube Neutrino Observatory.  Designed to detect the highest energy neutrinos expected to be produced in astrophysical processes, IceCube has established a vibrant scientific program that has begun to revolutionize the fields of particle and astro-physics. In this talk I will present some of the most recent results from this new window to the Universe, and will discuss the plans underway to significantly enhance its long-term future reach. 

Epistemic interpretations of quantum theory maintain that quantum states only represent incomplete information about the physical states of the world. A major motivation for this view is the promise to provide a reasonable account of state update under measurement by asserting that it is simply a natural feature of updating incomplete statistical information. Here we demonstrate that all known epistemic ontological models of quantum theory in dimension d ≥ 3, including those designed to evade the conclusion of the PBR theorem, cannot represent state update correctly. Conversely, interpretations for which the wavefunction is real evade such restrictions despite remaining subject to long-standing criticism regarding physical discontinuity, indeterminism and the ambiguity of the Heisenberg cut. This revives the possibility of a no-go theorem with no additional assumptions, and demonstrates that what is usually thought of as a strength of epistemic interpretations may in fact be a weakness. We also discuss hidden Markov models and their relationship to ontological models, demarcating the ways in which one might move ‘outside’ the ontological models formalism.

The construction of soluble lattice toy models is an important theoretical approach in the study of strongly interacting topological phases of matter. On the other hand, the primary experimental probe to such systems is via electromagnetic response. Somewhat unsatisfactorily, the current systematic construction of the lattice toy models focuses on braiding statistics and does not admit coupling to an electromagnetic background. Thus there is a mismatch between our theoretical approach and experimental probe. In this talk I introduce how to systematically incorporate electromagnetic response into the soluble lattice toy models, for a large class of abelian topological phases. [Reference: 1902.06756] 

Despite intensive theoretical research for several decades, the theory of quantum gravity remains elusive. I will review the obstacles that prevent from reconciling the principles of general relativity with those of quantum mechanics. It is plausible that an eventual ultraviolet completion of general relativity will require sacrificing some of these principles. I will then focus on the class of theories where the abandoned property is local Lorentz invariance, replaced by an approximate anisotropic scaling symmetry in deep ultraviolet. At low energies these theories reduce to a special type of scalar — tensor gravity. I will show that this approach allows us to construct renormalizable gravitational theories in any number of spacetime dimensions. The study of a (2+1) dimensional model reveals its asymptotic freedom and suggests that this property may be generic for gravity with anisotropic scaling. Relevance of these results for gravity in the real world will be discussed.

We compute the partition function of a massive free boson in a square lattice using a tensor network algorithm. We introduce a singular value decomposition (SVD) of continuous matrices that leads to very accurate numerical results. It is shown the emergence of a CDL fixed point structure. In the massless limit, we reproduce the results of conformal field theory including a precise value of the central charge.

In a synthetic approach to geometry and physics, one attempts to formulate an axiomatic system in purely logical terms, abstracting away from irrelevant "implementation details". In this talk, I will explain how intuitionistic logic and topos theory provide a synthetic theory of space, and then consider a (naive version of) Euclidean QFTs in terms of a conjectural elegant synthetic reformulation: a Euclidean QFT is nothing but a probability space in intuitionistic logic, extended by suitable modalities formalizing compact regions of space. Time permitting, I will sketch how this approach is roughly dual to AQFT, and/or how to define vacua in terms of the DLR equations. I am also hoping for feedback on how naive this approach really is in the light of renormalization.