High Energy Physics

The discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider marks the culmination of a decades-long hunt for the last ingredient of the Standard Model. At the same time, this discovery has started a new era in the search for more fundamental physics. In this talk, I will discuss what we have learned from the Higgs discovery about the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking and the implications for the existence of additional Higgs bosons. I will then highlight the future prospects of the Higgs boson in shedding light on New Physics and in particular on the nature of Dark Matter.

We will discuss techniques for computing 4-point functions of local operators in 2D conformal field theories, and their implications for semiclassical 3D quantum gravity. For generic 4-point functions, we present new closed-form expansions of the Virasoro conformal blocks. Specializing to correlators of holomorphic operators, these can be efficiently and exactly determined using an analytic implementation of the conformal bootstrap. Applying this method to the sewing construction of 2D CFT partition functions, we compute, via AdS/CFT, the semiclassical expansion of pure 3D quantum gravity around saddle point geometries of genus two; unlike at genus one, this expansion does not truncate at finite loop order.  

The presence of an instability in the Standard Model Higgs potential may have important implications for inflation and the viability of our Universe. In particular, if the Hubble scale during inflation is comparable to (or larger than) the instability scale of the potential, quantum fluctuations in the Higgs field will lead to the Higgs sampling the unstable part of the potential during inflation. However, to correctly study transitions to the unstable regime and determine the significance for the resulting universe requires addressing a number of subtleties. I will discuss these subtleties and a variety of possible approaches to studying Higgs evolution during inflation. By considering both (1) the evolution of Higgs fluctuations in the Gaussian approximation and (2) a perturbative calculation of the fluctuation two-point correlation function, I aim to elucidate how to address these issues in a consistent, physical way. The insight provided by these approaches will set the scene for studying Higgs fluctuations via the Fokker-Planck (FP) approach, which captures the non-Gaussian nature of the field. As such, it provides information about the rare—but, in terms of the fate of our Universe, potentially extremely important—patches that experience particularly large fluctuations.

In this talk I will propose a general correspondence which associates a non-perturbative quantum mechanical operator to a toric Calabi-Yau manifold, and I will propose a conjectural expression for its spectral determinant. As a consequence of these results, I will derive an exact quantization condition for the operator spectrum. I will give a concrete illustration of this conjecture by focusing on the example of local P2. This approach also provides a non-perturbative Fermi gas picture of topological strings on toric background and suggests the existence of an underlying theory of M2 branes behind this formulation.

With the increase of the center-of-mass energy from 8 TeV
to 13 TeV for LHC Run 2, the probability for boosted topologies will
become even higher than in Run 1. This also comes with a large
increase in pileup from the increased luminosity. This talk
investigates the state of the art of boosted algorithms and grooming
techniques, addresses shortcomings and possible improvements, and
discusses hot-topic items that will be interesting early on in Run 2.

Using holography, I will describe an approach for understanding the physics of a big bang singularity by translating the problem into the language of the dual quantum field theory. Certain two-point correlators in the dual field theory are sensitive to near-singularity physics in a dramatic way, and this provides an avenue for investigating how strong quantum gravity effects in string theory might modify the classical description of the big bang.

I will talk about the physics of models in which dark matter consists of composite bound states carrying a large conserved dark “nucleon” number. The properties of sufficiently large dark nuclei may obey simple scaling laws, and this scaling can determine the number distribution of nuclei resulting from Big Bang Dark Nucleosynthesis. For plausible models of asymmetric dark matter, dark nuclei of large nucleon number, e.g. >~ 10^8, may be synthesised, with the number distribution taking one of two characteristic forms, which interestingly are broadly independent of initial conditions. A possible consequence of these scenarios is alterations to direct detection signals, which may be coherently enhanced (relative to collider signals), and could be modified by new momentum-dependent form factors. Inelastic interactions between dark matter states might also be important in astrophysical settings.

The talk will be based on a work in progress with Stefano Kovacs
(Dublin IAS) and Yuki Sato (Wits University). In a previous work
(arxiv:1310.0016) we have shown that,
in the M-theory regime (large N with the Chern-Simon level k fixed)
of the duality between ABJM theory and M-theory on AdS4 x S7/Zk,
certain monopole operators with large R charges on the gauge theory side
correspond to spherical membranes
(which is in general in non-BPS excited states) in the pp-wave matrix
model on the dual side.

Having in mind application to
the study of three point functions of the monopole operators
from the dual side, we study the BPS instanton equation
of the pp-wave matrix model. The instanton equation describes, for example,
a process in which a single spherical membrane splits into
two spherical membranes. Under a certain
approximation which is valid when the matrix size is large,
the instanton equation can be recast
into a three dimensional Laplace equation;
a time snapshot of the membrane configuration corresponds
to an equipotential surface of the solution of the Laplace equation.
In order to study the above mentioned splitting process,
we found that one has to introduce a special boundary condition
of the Laplace equation: one prepares two copies of
three dimensional space which are connected in a manner analogous
to Riemann surfaces. We will discuss an exact solution
of the Laplace equation under this boundary condition, and 
the corresponding instanton solution, in which a membrane splits into two.

It is not known how to explain the excess of matter over antimatter with the Standard Model.  This matter asymmetry can be accounted for in certain extensions of the Standard Model through the mechanism of electroweak baryogenesis (EWBG), in which the extra baryons are created in the early Universe during the electroweak phase transition.  In this talk I will review EWBG, connect it to theories of new physics beyond the Standard Model, and show that in many cases the new particles and interactions required for efficient EWBG can be discovered using existing and expected data from the LHC.