Colloquium

A fundamental result in solid-state physics asserts that a crystalline material cannot be insulating unless the number of electrons per unit cell is an integer. Statements of this nature are immensely powerful because they are sensitive only to the general structure of the system and not to the microscopic details of the interactions. Such "kinematic constraints" have been extensively generalized in contemporary times, commonly under the term "quantum anomaly”. In this colloquium, I will first review some basic aspects of anomaly constraints in many-body quantum physics. Subsequently, I will demonstrate, through several recent examples, the significant role of quantum anomaly in constraining, understanding, and even unveiling novel quantum phases of matter.

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We investigate the recently found \cite{migdal2023exact} reduction of decaying turbulence in the Navier-Stokes equation in $3 + 1$ dimensions to a  Number Theory problem of finding the statistical limit of the Euler ensemble.
We reformulate the Euler ensemble as a Markov chain and show the equivalence of this formulation to the quantum statistical theory of free fermions on a ring, with an external field related to the random fractions of $\pi$. 

We find the solution of this system in the statistical limit $N\to \infty$ in terms of a complex trajectory (instanton) providing a saddle point to the path integral over the charge density of these fermions.

This results in an analytic formula for the observable correlation function of vorticity in wavevector space. This is a full solution of decaying turbulence from the first principle without assumptions, approximations, or fitted parameters.
We compute resulting integrals in \Mathematica{} and present effective indexes for the energy decay as a function of time Fig.\ref{fig::NPlot} and the energy spectrum as a function of the wavevector at fixed time Fig.\ref{fig::SPIndex}. 

In particular, the asymptotic value of the effective index in energy decay $n(\infty) = \frac{7}{4}$, but the universal function $n(t)$ is neither constant nor linear.

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Rich clusters of galaxies are the largest gravitational magnifiers in the Universe. One of the most interesting gravitational lensing phenomena arises when background galaxies overlap with the lensing caustics cast by the cluster lens, such that a portion of it is tremendously magnified by hundreds to even thousands fold. As a result, Nature’s most luminous classes of stars have been individually or collectively detected by space telescopes from cosmological distances. Quantitatively studying their behavior will enable us to probe an impressive hierarchy of fine mass structures inside the lens: from star-free sub-galactic cold dark matter halos, to intracluster stars, and to even minuscule dark matter clumps predicted in many of the particle physics models of the dark matter. I will talk about what we have theoretically understood about the extremely magnified stars, what latest observational advances there are, and what unique constraints on dark matter micro-structures can be derived.

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Gravity creates space-time boundaries that limit observables without limiting the flow of energy and information. This means that quantum systems in cosmology are often open systems: to describe them we must include the effects of interaction with an unobservable environment. In many cosmological settings, different observers see different parts of the spacetime; the ensemble of the open systems for each observer makes up the full cosmology. In this talk I will introduce a class of out-of-equilibrium quantum systems constructed to mimic some key features of cosmology and demonstrate the utility of treating the full system as an ensemble of open systems. I will use these models to illustrate the possible connections between cosmological open quantum systems and thermodynamics, as well as open-systems-inspired ways to think about locality.

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Significant advancements in our understanding of the physical world have been driven by increasingly precise atomic spectroscopy. The level of accessible precision entered a new realm with the advent of laser cooling and trapping. Now we can extend the ultrahigh spectroscopic precision, or atomic clock technology, to more complex quantum particles like diatomic molecules. The ability to quantify molecular degrees of freedom, such as nuclear vibrations, with nearly atomic-clock precision illuminates their previously hidden properties. Moreover, it suggests possibilities to leverage this precision for probing fundamental aspects of physical interactions, including enhanced tests of Newtonian gravity at the nanometer scale.

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Recently, there has been a growing interest in the relations between homotopy theory in mathematics and theoretical physics. Homotopy theory is used to classify and study physical systems. Also, physically motivated conjectures have led to many interesting developments in homotopy theory. I have been studying this subject as a mathematician. 

My recent works have been motivated by the Segal-Stolz-Teichner program, which is one of the most deep and important subjects relating homotopy theory and physics. They propose a geometric model, in terms of supersymmetric quantum field theories, of a homotopy-theoretic object "Topological Modular Forms". Based on this, we show the absence of anomaly in heterotic string theory (joint work with Yuji Tachikawa), and found a new physical and geometric understanding of duality (with Y.Tachikawa) and periodicity (with Theo Jonhson-Freyd) in homotopy theory. These works lead us to further interesting conjectures to explore. I would like to illustrate this exciting interplay between mathematics and physics. 

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Historically, the synergy between physics and geometry, from the times of Archimedes and Newton to the era of Einstein, has repeatedly been the catalyst for pivotal breakthroughs in physics and mathematics. In this talk, I will introduce a new narrative demonstrating how physics and geometry intertwine, leading to unexpected and significant results in critical phenomena in physics. Specifically, I will elucidate how non-commutative geometry—a mathematical framework born from the insights of physicists—offers fresh perspectives on conformal field theory, a subject with profound applications across various physics domains, from condensed matter to quantum gravity, and string theory.

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Current and future weak lensing surveys contain significant information about our universe. However, their optimal cosmological analysis is challenging, with traditional analyses often resulting in information loss due to reliance on summary statistics like two-point correlation functions. While deep learning methods offer promise in capturing the complex non-linear features of these cosmological fields, they often suffer from issues such as inadequate uncertainty quantification, susceptibility to distribution shifts, and interpretability limitations, which hinder their scientific applicability. In this talk, I propose a novel approach leveraging generative probabilistic modeling with Normalizing Flows to learn the data likelihood function at the field level, facilitating more effective cosmological information extraction. This framework not only enables anomaly detection of distribution shifts to improve the robustness of the analysis, but also fostering interpretability via generated samples. I will also discuss incorporating physical prior knowledge, such as symmetries and multiscale structure, into the model architectures to improve their generalization capabilities. Finally, I will explore the broader implications of deep probabilistic models in physics, highlighting their potential applications in diverse areas ranging from astronomical observations to high-energy physics and lattice field theory.

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Light bosons, including light axions, dark photons, and dilaton/moduli, are well motivated extensions to the Standard Model of particle physics and intriguing dark matter candidates. Much progress has been made in recent years in both astrophysical and lab searches for these light bosons with the understanding that these light bosons act like weak classical waves which permeate the space we occupy. 

In this talk, I will discuss some novel phenomenon of light bosons in the dark sector, based on important in medium effects of these particles. I will show how to take advantage of medium effects of the photon to optimize searches for these light bosons with data coming from cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments, and improve sensitivity to light dark photons and axions by orders of magnitude. I will also show how thinking of dark photon as weak classical waves breaks down during production of light bosons in both early and late universe, when gauged strings are produced in an event we call the string Bosenova, as well as the resulting observable consequences.

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Feynman diagrams and the associated integrals are crucial in perturbative quantum field theory for translating theory input into concrete, observable quantities. I will talk about the fascinating interplay of physics and mathematics that emerges from the ensemble of these diagrams. From linear algebra to quantum mechanics or wave phenomena to Fourier analysis - physics and mathematics tend to regularly exchange ideas that often lead to breakthroughs on the other side. I will illustrate two new examples of such exchanges I contributed to. One exchange is from the mathematical theory of tropical geometry to evaluating intricate, physically relevant Feynman integrals that have been inaccessible before. In the second exchange, we used ensembles of Feynman diagrams and their renormalization to prove a long-standing conjecture in geometric group theory. The results give new insights into the 'dark matter'-problem in the moduli spaces of graphs and curves' cohomology.  Both these moduli spaces' cohomologies are of fundamental interest in algebraic geometry, topology and geometric group theory.

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The Langlands program is a grand organizing vision for a large slice of number theory and representation theory. A shockingly accurate metaphor for the Langlands program has emerged as electric-magnetic duality in four-dimensional gauge theory, but where the role of spacetime is played by objects from arithmetic. I will describe recent work with Yiannis Sakellaridis and Akshay Venkatesh, in which we apply ideas from QFT (the Gaiotto-Witten electric-magnetic duality for boundary theories) to a fundamental problem in number theory, predicting the relation between L-functions of Galois representations and integrals of automorphic forms.

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What happened in the earliest moments of the Universe? Despite decades of theoretical and observational work, a detailed understanding of the primordial Universe has remained elusive. In this talk, I will show how surveys of millions of galaxies can shed new light on these issues by constraining the statistics of the Universe just after inflation. By combining robust perturbative models with novel numerical techniques, I have placed some of the first (non-Gaussian) constraints on the dynamics and field content of inflation from galaxy surveys; these will sharpen considerably in the next decade as the volume of observational data grows. Through a combination of traditional perturbative approaches and new symmetry-based techniques, I will demonstrate how current and future galaxy surveys can be used to search for a wealth of new physics, including primordial scattering processes and parity violation, opening the door to constraining ultra-high-energy physics with low-energy data.

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