Talks

Quasars are among the most powerful light sources in the universe and, as such, can be seen at cosmological distances. Is some rare occasions (although not that rare), a massive galaxy on their line of sight can act as a gravitational lens and produce multiple images of distant quasars. These can be used both for cosmology and astrophysics by measuring the so-called time delays between the lensed images from photometric monitoring, a quantity directly related to the Hubble-Lemaître parameter H0. The same data, affected by microlensing by stars in the lensing galaxy, can be used to measure the size and energy profile of quasar accretion disks on spatial scales of the order of the light-day, i.e. inaccessible to even the largest interferometers, including the SKA. The results in this talk are on behalf of the COSMOGRAIL and H0LiCOW collaborations. 

In the first part of the talk, I will mention the ongoing numerical efforts using lattice calculations to understand the holographic dualities relating the super Yang-Mills (SYM) theories in various dimensions and their conjectured Type II supergravity theories in the decoupling limit. In the second part, I will discuss the tensor renormalization group study of the SU(2) gauge-Higgs model in two dimensions using the higher-order tensor renormalization group (HOTRG) algorithm and compare the results with the Monte Carlo simulations. 

Quantum gravity may be viewed as a bipartite matter-geometry system. Evolution of matter-geometry entanglement entropy is an interesting question for issues such as the emergence of QFT on curved spacetime from quantum gravity: emergence would require initial states to evolve to product states. We study this question in a cosmological model. We give numerical evidence that matter-geometry entanglement entropy increases indefinitely (with respect to a relational time) for apparently arbitrary initial states. This result raises the question of whether matter and geometry remain entangled in a large Universe.