High Energy Physics

While entanglement has been examined extensively in AdS/CFT, it has avoided significant attention in the study of celestial holography and asymptotic symmetries relevant to asymptotically flat spacetime. I will present work that considers the entanglement of a Milne patch for Maxwell theory in Minkowski spacetime from the perspective of celestial holography. In the Minkowski vacuum, we find that the Milne patch is thermally entangled. We interpret the thermal entangling operator that builds the Minkowski vacuum from the Milne vacuum as an interaction term in the celestial CFT. We further examine the edge modes of the Milne patch, assigning them a physical interpretation as fluctuations in Milne asymptotic charge. Interestingly, we find that the constraint governing these edge modes includes sources that avoid the Minkowski interior. Altogether, by studying entanglement along the extra holographic direction present in celestial holography but absent in AdS/CFT, our work bridges a critical gap between our understanding of entanglement in the latter and the physically relevant setting of asymptotically flat spacetime.

Zoom Link: TBD

The holographic duality between strongly coupled quantum field theories and weakly coupled gravitational theories in one higher dimension holds, in principle, the promise of understanding strongly coupled systems that occur in condensed matter physics, such as the "strange" metals that appear in materials such as high-Tc cuprates. Unfortunately, the holographic models of metals that have previously been studied have not been successful in capturing even the most basic physics that any realistic model of a metal should obey. In this talk, I will review the essential properties that any metal (strongly coupled or not) must satisfy, and propose a new holographic model that is consistent with these requirements. The new model is based on a radically different approach compared with previous holographic models of metals, and crucially relies on recent work that formulates in a precise way the conditions for an IR effective field theory to be "emergeable" from a UV theory at nonzero charge density. In particular, the holographic model I study is dual to a quantum field theory with a global symmetry group LU(1) -- the "loop group" whose elements are smooth functions from the circle into U(1). I present the results of a solution of the model and argue that its properties are qualitatively consistent with what one should expect to find in a strongly coupled metal.

Zoom Link: TBD

It has long been known in studies of Pion physics, non-linear sigma models and cosmology that thinking in terms of field space metrics can be useful. Such an approach can help identify and define field redefinition invariant physics in observables. This approach is reemerging recently an a key organizing principle and calculational tool for interpreting collider physics data to study Higgs properties. I will review some known results and discuss outstanding issues being worked on in this area. 

Zoom Link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/96662488113?pwd=cGs0THQwWXRkcm9pVzcwVytnNjZ5Zz09

For a theory whose half-BPS sector can be described by N=4 quiver quantum mechanics, its BPS algebra (à la Harvey-Moore) is given by the quiver Yangian. I will first review the construction of the BPS quiver Yangians and then discuss their applications, such as on BPS counting, Gauge/Bethe correspondence, and knot-quiver correspondence. 

Zoom Link: TBD

We develop the bulk geometric description of correlation functions of operators whose scaling dimensions are of order the central charge in AdS/CFT. We follow a bottom-up approach, discussing solutions to Einstein gravity that are closely related to familiar black holes in AdS. In order to reproduce the correct dependence of a conformal correlation function on the location of operator insertions, we must introduce a novel Gibbons-Hawking-York boundary term associated with the stretched horizon of each black hole. We discuss the bulk dual of two point functions in CFT’s living in arbitrary dimensions. Specializing to AdS3 allows us to discuss higher point functions, where we find that the dual geometries are sometimes multi-boundary wormholes, whose holographic interpretation has been the focus of much recent activity.

Zoom Link: TBD

Getting the strongest physics conclusions from collider particle physics experiments regarding the (in)consistency of the Standard Model with actual measurements requires Effective Field Theory techniques. This approach (known as the SMEFT) has been rapidly advanced in recent years, leading to new analyses of the data being executed by Atlas and CMS. The current state of the theoretical art is not precise enough as such EXP studies are continued into the future, as the measurements continue to become more precise. We need to be able to calculate more precisely in the SMEFT to keep up. After an intro to this area of research, I will discuss some recent calculations that have pushed things to the two loop level in precision for higgs production/decay in the SMEFT, and how thinking geometrically (in terms of field space connections and the resulting Higgs geometries) in EFT is the key to keep advancing the theoretical state of the art.

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/99931154202?pwd=SUMzK2JIS0prNk5KaGZWakphckZhdz09

Gravity is exciting from both theoretical and observational perspectives. In this talk, I will discuss how gravitational observables, such as waveforms, can be determined from scattering amplitudes in quantum field theory. We can therefore use the full arsenal of theoretical collider physics to compute gravitational waveforms. As an example, I will describe the waveform generated in a scattering process at next-to-leading order. I will finish by discussing how amplitudes can further be used to understand non-radiative aspects of gravity, including the curvature of the Kerr metric itself. This leads to a network of “double copy” relations between classical solutions of the Maxwell and Einstein equations.

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/92038383246?pwd=RjQwVHo1VWR6VDl0a3VPZEU0ZXFyUT09

A new approach for the first quantization of superstrings, called B-RNS-GSS formalism, is being constructed. It consists of quantizing embeddings of super surfaces into superspaces. As in the classical theory of super-embeddings, it has twistor-like variables. In this talk, besides motivating the need for such a formalism, I will review the work done in hep-th: 2211.06899, where the hetetoric supergravity equations of motion were derived from BRST nilpotency.

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/98656433153?pwd=NjlpcUtITDAwWlgycUtUZUVsZ3QrQT09