Talks

One of humanity's defining traits is to be deeply curious about the world around us. We've all looked up at the night sky, marvelled at rainbows, and been awed by the power of lightening. We've also wondered how these and other natural phenomena work. This curiosity-driven process of investigation of the world lies at the heart of science. Throughout history, it has driven scientists to develop new ideas about how nature works and then test them in experiments. Successful ideas have led to increasingly accurate and wide-ranging predictions about world. They have also yielded technologies that have transformed our daily lives. Science's impact on the world has been monumental. But how does the process of science actually work? How does this field of endeavour progress over time? How do successful new theories develop, become accepted and replace existing ones? Join host Damian Pope, and PI Researchers Louis Leblond, Itay Yavin and Astrid Eichhorn for a thought-provoking evening of science and ideas.

In this talk, I will present a first principle construction of a holographic dual for gauged matrix models. The dual theory is a closed string field theory coupled with an emergent two-form gauge field defined in one higher dimensional space. The bulk space with an extra dimension emerges as a well defined classical background only when the two-form gauge field is in the deconfinement phase. Based on this, it is shown that critical phases that admit holographic descriptions form a novel universality class with a non-trivial quantum order.

In this talk, I will discuss constraints on dark matter (DM) from collider physics, neutron stars and DM halo shapes. Monojet plus missing energy searches at hardron colliders limit DM interactions with quarks and gluons, which provide a complementary probes of DM to direct detection. Stars can capture ambient DM particles. The captured scalar DM particles may form a Bose-Einstein condensate, leading to a black hole at the center of the host neutron star that eventually causes its destruction. The observation of old neutron stars exclude a wide range of the DM-neutron scattering cross-section for the scalar asymmetric DM. In various well-motivated models, DM has self-interactions which may leave imprints on galactic dynamics. I will discuss an upper bound on DM self-interaction cross section derived from elliptical DM halo shapes which is about two orders of magnitude stronger than the result from the Bullet Cluster.

The time variation of physical constants has been much discussed in the literature, motivated by claims of fine structure constant variations together with several theoretical ideas. Although it is well understood (by most, but not all!) cosmologists that one must consider only dimensionless constants, most discussions of the strength of gravity involve "G", which is of course dimensional. I discuss some applications of variations of "G" on cosmological observables, stressing the need to stay dimensionless. "Constants" might also vary in space. An idea which is perhaps less crazy is that cosmological parameters might vary across the observable Universe. I show how this leads to dipole modulation, which corresponds to a correlation between neighbouring multipoles in maps of the cosmic microwave sky. Searches for such signals could lead to constraints on the variation of the cosmological model on the largest accessible scales.