Talks

 I  will first analytically show a simple, yet subtle "invariance" of two-body decay kinematics for the case of a massless  daughter and a mother particle which is unpolarized and has a *generic* boost distribution in the laboratory frame. Namely, the laboratory frame energy distribution of the massless decay product has a peak, whose location is identical to the  (fixed) energy of that particle in the rest frame of the corresponding mother particle. In turn, this value of the energy is a simple function of the other masses involved in the decay.
As a proof of principle of the usefulness of this observation, I will then apply it for measuring  the mass of the top quark at the LHC, using simulated data (including experimental  effects). In fact, CMS collaboration (in CMS-PAS-TOP-15-002) has recently implemented our method for measuring the top quark mass! Finally, I will show how it can be used to measure all the superpartner masses in a cascade decay chain of the gluino.

The Hartle-Hawking (HH) no-boundary proposal provides a Euclidean path integral prescription for a measure on the space of all possible initial conditions. Apart from  saddle point  and  minisuper-space calculations, it is hard to obtain results using the unregulated path integral. A promising choice of spacetime  regularisation comes from the causal set (CST) approach to quantum gravity.  Using analytic results as well as Markov Chain Monte Carlo and numerical integration methods we obtain  the HH wave function in a theory of non-perturbative 2d CST. We find that the  wave function is sharply peaked with the peak geometry changing discretely with "temperature". In the low temperature regime the peak corresponds to causal sets which have no continuum counterpart but exhibit physically interesting behaviour. They show a rapid spatial expansion with respect to the discrete proper time as well as  a high degree of spatial homogeneity due to extensive overlap of the causal past. While our results are limited to 2 dimensions they provide a concrete example of how quantum gravity could explain the initial conditions for our observable universe.

I'll discuss the two topological twists of 3d N=4 theories, and explain how to understand them in the AKSZ/BV formalism, and how they relate to twists of 4d N =2 theories.  Symplectic duality then takes the form of an equivalence between 3d N=4 theories which interchanges the two topological twists.  I'll also introduce monopole operators and explain the role they play in symplectic duality.

In this talk I will describe numerical constructions of gravitational
duals of theories deformed by localized Dirac delta sources for scalar
operators. We perform two different constructions, one at zero and
the other at nonzero temperature. Surprisingly we find that imposing the preservation of scale
invariance at zero temperature requires the bulk scalar self-interaction potential to be
the one found in a certain Kaluza-Klein compactification of 11D supergravity.
The gravitational setup seems a-priori to be quite unusual and challenging
from the numerical relativity perspective.

Topological aspects of physical systems, including the called topological states of matter, have become hot topics in the frontiers of physics in recent years. Here I would like to present a mathematically "popular" talk for professional physicists for a highlight or overview of how one can systematize knowledge of topological aspects of quantum field theories. Our starting points are Descent Equations and Gauge Structure in Configuration Space in Field Theory. (The audience needs only to know the meaning of "differential forms".)