Talks

Fast Radio Bursts are mysterious radio flashes that appear to have extragalactic origin. The inferred isotropic brightness temperature for these events can exceed 10^34 K. Discovered in 2006, only about 25 have been reported to date. I will give a short summary of the these events then explain how a new generation of dense radio arrays will dramatically improve our understanding of these burst. The HIRAX telescope in South Africa will detect about 10 FRBs per day and will localize these events with sub-arcsecond precision. A next generation of packed array could detect one every minute, allowing tomography of the ionized universe.

The notion of singular support for coherent sheaves was introduced by Arinkin and Gaitsgory in order to carefully state the geometric Langlands conjecture.  This is a conjectural equivalence of categories of sheaves on certain moduli spaces: in order to make the conjecture reasonable one needs to restrict to sheaves which satisfy a certain "singular support condition".  In this talk I'll explain how to think about this singular support condition from the point of view of boundary conditions in twisted N=4 gauge theory.  Specifically, Arinkin and Gaitsgory's singular support condition arises by considering only those boundary conditions which are compatible with a natural choice of vacuum state.  By allowing this vacuum state to move away from this natural choice we see aspects of a rich additional structure for the geometric Langlands correspondence.  This work is joint with Philsang Yoo.

Any quantum field theory can be thought of as arising from a perturbed UV conformal field theory, suggesting that information about the full RG flow is encoded in the original CFT. I will discuss ongoing work developing new methods for extracting this information to study strongly-coupled IR dynamics. This method uses a UV basis of conformal Casimir eigenstates to construct the Hamiltonian, which is then truncated at some maximum Casimir eigenvalue and diagonalized to approximate the low energy spectrum of the IR theory. After presenting a general framework which can be applied to CFTs in any number of dimensions, I will then focus on the specific example of scalar field theory, which can be used to study strongly-coupled systems like the 2D and 3D Ising models. Finally, I will discuss the possible application of this framework to gauge theories, including QCD.