Talks

A burst of gravitational radiation passing through an arrangement of freely falling test masses far from the source will cause a permanent displacement of the masses, called the ''gravitational memory''. It has recently been found that this memory is closely related to the change in the so called ''super-translation'' charge carried by the spacetime, where ''super-translations'' here refer to an unexpected enlargement of the asymptotic symmetries of general relativity beyond the expected asymptotic Poincare-transformations, known already since the work of Bondi et al. in the early 60s (no relation with ‘’supersymmetry''). I will describe these concepts from an intuitive perspective and point out that super-translations, as well as gravitational memory, are a phenomenon that is unique to relativity in 3+1, but not higher, dimensions. I close the talk by explaining the relation between these results and the notion of a ''charge super-selection sector'' in quantum field theories with massless particles such as QED.

[Based on joint work with A. Ishibashi and R. M. Wald]

Quantum complexity is conjectured to probe inside of black hole horizons (or wormhole) via gauge gravity correspondence. In order to have a better understanding of this correspondence, we study time evolutions of complexities for generic Abelian pure gauge theories. For this purpose, we discretize U(1) gauge group as Z_N and also continuum spacetime as lattice spacetime, and this enables us to define a universal gate set for these gauge theories, and evaluate time evolutions of the complexities explicitly. We find that to achieve a large complexity ∼exp(entropy), which is one of the conjectured criteria necessary to have a dual  black hole, the Abelian gauge theory needs to be maximally nonlocal. (Based on collaboration with Norihiro Iizuka and Sotaro Sugishita, https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.03840)

In models of inflation driven by an axion-like pseudoscalar field, the inflaton, a, may couple to the standard model hypercharge gauge field via a Chern-Simons-type interaction, L ⊃ a F F̃. This coupling results in the explosive production of hypermagnetic fields during inflation, which has two interesting consequences: (1) The primordial hypermagnetic field is maximally helical. It is therefore capable of sourcing the generation of nonzero baryon number around the electroweak phase transition (via the chiral anomaly in the standard model). (2) The gauge field production during inflation feeds back into the stochastic background of gravitational waves (GWs). In this talk, I am going to discuss the correlation between these two phenomena. To this end, I will (a) present an updated study of baryogenesis via hypermagnetic fields after pseudoscalar inflation and (b) describe the corresponding implications for GWs. As it turns out, successful baryogenesis is feasible---provided the axion coupling to the gauge fields is suppressed by a decay constant \Lambda ~ 3 x 10^17 GeV. Moreover, in the case of successful baryogenesis, one expects a characteristic peak in the GW spectrum at frequencies in the MHz range