A natural way to extend Einstein's General Relativity to the high-energy regime is to introduce quadratic curvature operators, which give rise to a renormalizable gravitational Lagrangian in four dimensions. However, this theory turns out to be pathological due to an additional massive spin-2 ghost that causes classical instabilities and breaks perturbative unitarity at the quantum level. In this talk, we investigate which principles of QFT are usually affected when higher-order derivative operators are present in a Lagrangian, and show that one possibility to avoid ghosts is giving up locality. In fact, the emergence of non-local physics at short distances and high energies is a common prediction for various quantum gravity approaches. We propose a model-independent approach to constrain the non-local Lagrangian in quantum gravity, thus providing a novel scenario in which different quantum gravity programs can be fruitfully contrasted in terms of foundational concepts and computational methods.

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/96167652193?pwd=OWFDV1JXVGxLdE1qMHo4N3ZKcDByQT09

Charge (electric, magnetic, or any U(1) charge) is a parameter often neglected in simulations of black holes. As a result, little is known about the dynamics of charged binaries. In this talk, I will highlight the importance of understanding the non-linear interaction of charged black holes for astrophysics and fundamental physics. I will show results from fully self-consistent general-relativistic simulations of merging black holes, touching upon the challenges faced in performing such calculations and the improvements that enabled successful long-term evolution. I will discuss general features of quasi-circular inspirals, and present constraints on the charge of astrophysical black holes and deviation from general relativity obtained from the gravitational-wave event GW150914. Finally, I will highlight the relevance of this line of research in the context of the upcoming gravitational-wave detectors.

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/93809443805?pwd=bmcvd3NZWjUraERBcGdtL2Y3WTl6QT09

In the new wave of quantum foundations activity with its indirect approach to problems of fundamental ontology, individual explicit positions of informational immaterialism are replaced by a shared "soft informatic realism" that governs research practice, encouraging conflation of theories of information processes and theories of physical processes, and disregard for the microphysical dynamics effecting a given information process.  This kind of abstraction, indispensable in the formulation of enlightening no-go theorems, can become problematic when imported to certain other projects, including recently popular investigations of quantum causal structure.  I shall provide examples, describe ramifications for the efficiency of knowledge production in quantum foundations, and consider when features of quantum information processing can legitimately be called informatic features of quantum physics.

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/93415836509?pwd=MXJLZVVzMnZjcWFQSWM0dmg5czE3dz09

Symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases are short-range entanglement (SRE) quantum states which cannot be adiabatically connected to trivial product states in the presence of symmetries. Recently, it is shown that symmetry-protected short-range entanglement can still prevail even if part of the protecting symmetry is broken by quenched disorder locally but restored upon disorder averaging, dubbed as the average symmetry-protected topological (ASPT) phases. In this talk, I will systematically construct the ASPT phases as a mixed ensemble or density matrix, which may not be realized in a clean system without any disorder. I will also design the strange correlator of the ASPT phases via a strange density matrix to detect the nontrivial ASPT state. Moreover, it is amazing that the strange correlator of ASPT can be precisely mapped to the loop correlation functions of some proper statistical loop models, with power-law behaviors.

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/91672345456?pwd=N0dNQXNmVVoybnNxYXJuWnVRME8rUT09

This course uses quantum electrodynamics (QED) as a vehicle for covering several more advanced topics within quantum field theory, and so is aimed at graduate students that already have had an introductory course on quantum field theory. Among the topics hoped to be covered are: gauge invariance for massless spin-1 particles from special relativity and quantum mechanics; Ward identities; photon scattering and loops; UV and IR divergences and why they are handled differently; effective theories and the renormalization group; anomalies.

In this talk, I will show that the action of soft graviton operators generates a w(1+infinity) symmetry in gravitational theories minimally coupled to massless and massive scalar matter in 4D asymptotically flat spacetimes.  I will discuss how the symmetry action follows from an infinite tower of soft graviton theorems in momentum space.  By generalizing the previous analyses of w(1+infinity) symmetry in massless amplitudes, these results clarify that the symmetry emerges in 4D asymptotically flat gravitational theories without any additional technical ingredients.  This talk is based on a forthcoming paper with Monica Pate. 

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/91448920819?pwd=cFY0L1JPVFF2bDUwc3JiVlRlbE5ldz09

Searches for dark matter decaying into photons constrain its lifetime to be many orders of magnitude larger than the age of the Universe. A corollary statement is that the abundance of any particle that can decay into photons over cosmological timescales is constrained to be much smaller than the cold dark-matter density. We show that an irreducible freeze-in contribution to the relic density of axions is in violation of that statement in a large portion of the parameter space. This allows us to set stringent constraints on axions in the mass range 100 eV - 100 MeV. 

Zoom Link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/99147137560?pwd=MC81d3h0OE9BZzZQcGpJakVvOFVOQT09

A key challenge for the next decade of survey cosmology is ensuring that the models for summary statistics they measure, such as galaxy clustering and lensing, are sufficiently accurate in light of the high degree of precision of these measurements. A recently proposed class of models, hybrid effective field theory (hybrid EFT), combines perturbation theory-based descriptions of the tracer--matter connection with the nonlinear dark matter distributions produced by cosmological N-body simulations. I will show how hybrid EFT promises to be a powerful model for describing the two-point statistics of clustering and lensing to small scales at high accuracy. I will proceed to survey recent developments in this juncture between simulations and perturbation theory that show their combination is mutually beneficial beyond just modelling two-point statistics.

Zoom link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/93665218297?pwd=T3RLUzRaVDljR2hCNGFxM0l2TVZEdz09

This course uses quantum electrodynamics (QED) as a vehicle for covering several more advanced topics within quantum field theory, and so is aimed at graduate students that already have had an introductory course on quantum field theory. Among the topics hoped to be covered are: gauge invariance for massless spin-1 particles from special relativity and quantum mechanics; Ward identities; photon scattering and loops; UV and IR divergences and why they are handled differently; effective theories and the renormalization group; anomalies.