Colloquium

An overview will be given of recently discovered connection between asymptotic symmetries in general relativity  and soft theorems in quantum field theory together with their implications for the black hole information paradox.

I will first show that a number of persistent astrophysical puzzles, including missing pulsars in the galactic center, fast radio bursts, the abundance of r-process elements, and the type Ia supernova progenitor problem, may all be an emerging signature of dark matter. I will address some theoretical implications and new astrophysical phenomena -- for example "quiet kilonovae" and "r-process donuts" -- associated with this dark matter. Then, I will describe a newly discovered effect, that dark matter crashing into neutron stars warms them to infrared temperatures detectable with the Thirty Meter, European Extremely Large, and James Webb Space telescopes.

Dark matter is all around us, however its particle physics nature is still mysterious. Searches for dark matter have largely focused on candidates with weak scale interactions to the standard model particles, the so-called WIMP paradigm. However, the parameter space of the WIMP paradigm is becoming increasingly constrained by both the LHC and direct detection experiments. Another possibility that is well motivated both theoretically and observationally is to have a dark sector connected with the visible one via a mediator whose coupling to the visible one is tiny. In this talk, based on my own work, I will discuss models in this direction and how to search for signals from the dark sector using various experiments including particle accelerators, dark matter direct detection experiments, cosmic ray experiments, and cosmic microwave background observation. 

The origin and composition of 85% of the matter in the universe is completely unknown. Among several viable options, Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) are motivated dark matter candidates that can be tested by different and complementary search strategies. Crucially, different searches probe WIMP couplings at different energy scales, and such a separation of scales has striking consequences in connecting different experimental probes. This motivates the development of theoretical tools to properly connect the different energy scales involved in constraining WIMP models. I will introduce these tools and I will illustrate with several examples how crucial the inclusion of these effects in WIMP searches is.

Collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are dominated by jets, collimated sprays of particles that arise from quantum chromodynamics (QCD) at high energies.  With the remarkable performance of the ATLAS and CMS detectors, jets can now be characterized not just by their overall direction and energy but also by their substructure.  In this talk, I highlight the increasingly important role that jet substructure is playing in searches for dark matter and other new physics at the LHC, especially when exploring extreme kinematic regimes involving large Lorentz boosts.

I also explain how innovative theoretical studies of jet substructure have taught us surprising lessons about QCD, revealing new probes of hot dense matter and universal features of gauge theories.

In the past few years we have witnessed a flurry of activity in the field of topological phases of matter. An outstanding theme in the field is the study of the interplay between geometry and topology of many-body wave functions, which has attracted the attention of condensed matter and high-energy physicists. In this talk, I will present the quantum field-theoretic descriptions of the fascinating novel phenomena emergent from intertwined geometry and topology, which are vividly exemplified by the geometric responses in fractional quantum Hall systems. For the strict topological limit, where only the global topology of space matters, the fractional quantum Hall systems are characterized by their universal properties such as fractional quantum Hall conductivity and a degeneracy on surfaces with the topology of a torus. Quite surprisingly, these topological fluids also couple to the geometry and have universal responses to the adiabatic deformations of the background geometry. These responses are given by a Wen-Zee term, Hall viscosity term, and gravitational Chern-Simons term. Through the field-theoretic approaches of the topological fluids, I will for the first time show how to derive all the universal geometric responses. To account for the coupling to the background geometry, I show that the concept of “flux attachment” must be modified in the curved space and use it to derive the responses from Chern-Simons theories for all the known fractional quantum Hall states. I also apply these results to the theory of the anisotropic quantum Hall systems, where the geometric responses play a central role in understanding their universal physics.

Many-body entanglement can lead to exotic phases of matter beyond conventional symmetry breaking paradigm. Those exotic phases may contain fractionalized quasiparticles and emergent gauge fields. In this talk,  I will focus on a wide class of long-range entangled phases—quantum spin liquid. In quantum spin liquids, the spins are entangled in some intricate fashion giving rise to interesting physics such as emergent topological field theory and QED3 theory. I will show in detail how such exotic physics can emerge in simple spin systems.

It is commonly believed that quantum information is not lost in a black hole. Instead, it is encoded into non-local degrees of freedom in some clever way; like a quantum error-correcting code. In this talk, I will discuss how one may resolve some paradoxes in quantum gravity by using the theory of quantum error-correction. First, I will introduce a simple toy model of the AdS/CFT correspondence based on tensor networks and demonstrate that the correspondence between the AdS gravity and CFT is indeed a realization of quantum codes. I will then show that the butterfly effect/scrambling in black holes can be interpreted as non-local encoding of quantum information and can be quantitatively measured by out-of-time ordered correlations. Finally I will describe a simple decoding protocol for reconstructing a quantum state from the Hawking radiation and suggest a physical interpretation as a traversable wormhole in an AdS black hole. The decoding protocol also provides an attractive platform for laboratory experiments for measuring out-of-time ordered correlation functions as it clearly distinguishes unitary scrambling from non-unitary decoherence. 

General relativity taught us that space time is dynamical and quantum theory posits that dynamical objects are quantum. Hence the Newtonian notion of space time as a passive stage where physics takes place needs to be replaced by a notion of quantum space time which is interacting with all other quantum matter fields.

I will present recent developments that aim at constructing quantum space time. In particular I will explain how  topological quantum field theories give rise to new quantum geometry realizations and how these serve as starting points  for the construction of a  dynamics  of quantum gravity, which is consistent over all scales.  Such a dynamics will then determine the properties of quantum space time.  

Topological phases of matter serve as one of the most striking examples of the richness and novelty of quantum systems with many degrees of freedom.  In contrast to conventional matter, they are characterized by both non-local properties and non-classical notions such as entanglement.  I will discuss two broad categories of topological phases, distinguished by whether or not they possess fractionalized “anyon” excitations that are neither bosons nor fermions.  I will demonstrate that entanglement not only provides an understanding of such phases but also enables the transmutation between these two categories of topological phases. 

We normally think of large accelerators and large-scale cosmic events when we consider the frontiers of elementary particle physics, pushing to understand the universe at higher and higher energy scales. However, several tabletop low-energy experiments are posed to discover a wide range of new physics beyond the Standard model, where feeble interactions require precision measurements rather than high energies.  In our experiments, high-Q resonant sensors enable ultra-sensitive force and field detection. In this talk I will describe two applications of these sensors in searches for new physics, based on techniques in atomic-molecular-and optical (AMO) physics. First, I will discuss an experiment which uses laser-cooled optically trapped silica nanospheres to search for corrections to Newtonian gravity at micron distances with zeptonewton sensitivity.  Finally, I will discuss the Axion Resonant InterAction Detection Experiment (ARIADNE), a new precision magnetometry experiment using laser-polarized 3-He gas to search for a notable dark-matter candidate: the QCD axion.  

I present three possible non-standard additions to cosmology.  First I show that a very long early period of inflation could exist in which parameters evolve, or 'relax', to seemingly fine-tuned values.  Next, I show that even if cosmic inflation existed, a period after inflation with anisotropic stress can dramatically affect super-horizon modes and thus the imprint on the cosmic microwave background.  Finally, I show that cosmological singularities can be avoided by a bounce without using exotic matter that violates the Null Energy Condition, but by the addition of vorticity in compact extra dimensions.