Colloquium

The modeling of pulsar radio and gamma-ray emission suggests that in order to interpret the observations one needs to understand the field geometry and the plasma state in the emission region. In recent years, significant progress has been achieved in understanding the magnetospheric structure in the limit of abundant plasma supply. However, the very presence of dense plasma everywhere in the magnetosphere is not obvious. Even the region where the observed emission is produced is subject to debate. To address this from first principles, we constructed global kinetic simulations of pulsar magnetospheres using relativistic Particle-in-Cell codes, which capture the physics of plasma production and particle acceleration. In this talk I will describe how plasma is produced in magnetospheres of pulsars and show that effects of general relativity are crucial for the activity of pulsars with low inclination angles. I will present modeling of high-energy lightcurves, calculated self-consistently from particle motion in the pulsar magnetosphere. I will also show evidence that observed radio emission is powered by non-stationary discharge at the polar cap. Finally, I will argue that giant radio pulses in the Crab are produced by coherent plasma currents, which appear at the interfaces of merging plasmoids in the current sheet beyond the light cylinder.

Over the past several years, our understanding of topological electronic phases of matter has advanced dramatically.   A paradigm that has emerged is that insulating electronic states with an energy gap fall into distinct topological classes.   Interfaces between different topological phases exhibit gapless conducting states that are protected topologically and are impossible to get rid of.   In this talk we will discuss the application of this idea to the quantum Hall effect, topological insulators,  topological superconductors and the quest for Majorana fermions in condensed matter.   We will then show that similar ideas arise in a completely different class of problems.    Isostatic lattices are arrays of masses and springs that are at the verge of mechanical instability.   They play an important role in our understanding of granular matter, glasses and other 'soft' systems.  Depending on their geometry, they can exhibit zero-frequency 'floppy' modes localized on their boundaries that are insensitive to local perturbations.   The mathematical relation between this classical system and quantum electronic systems reveals an unexpected connection between theories of hard and soft matter.

The existence of a deconfined quantum-critical point [1] between the standard antiferromagnet
and a valence-bond solid in 2D S=1/2 quantum magnets has been controversial, in part due to
anomalous finite-size scaling behaviors observed in quantum Monte Carlo simulations interpreted by some as signs of a first-order transition. I will discuss a new finite-size scaling hypothesis in which a scaling function of two divergent length scales [the standard correlation length and a length-scale related to an emergent U(1) symmetry of the valence-bond solid] has a limiting form implying unconventional finite-size scaling behaviors, while maintaining conventional scaling in the thermodynamic limit [2]. This proposal goes beyond the standard scenario of a dangerously irrelevant perturbation as a source of the second length scale in, e.g., classical 3D clock models. Quantum Monte Carlo simulations of the J-Q model (a spin-1=2 Heisenberg model extended with certain multi-spin interactions) are in full agreement with the proposed scaling form, suggesting that deconfined quantum-criticality is an even richer phenomenon than initially imagined. Since finite temperature T plays the role of a finite imaginary-time dimension in quantum systems, the anomalous scaling behavior impacts also the scaling in the quantum-critical \fan" at T > 0. This is also observed in the J-Q model.

[1] H. Shao, W. Guo, and A. W. Sandvik, Science 352, 213 (2016).
[2] T. Senthil, A. Vishwanath, L. Balents, S. Sachdev, M. P. A. Fisher, Science 303, 1490 (2004).

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.