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In this talk I will assess various proposals for the source of the intuition that there is something problematic about contextuality, and argue that contextuality is best thought of in terms of fine-tuning. I will suggest that as with other fine-tuning problems in quantum mechanics, this behaviour can be understood as a manifestation of teleological features of physics. I will also introduce several formal mathematical frameworks that have been used to analyse contextuality and discuss how their results should be interpreted. 

Let K be a knot or link in the 3-sphere. I will explain how one can count minimal surfaces in hyperbolic 4-space which have ideal boundary equal to K, and in this way obtain a link invariant. In other words the number of minimal surfaces doesn’t depend on the isotopy class of the link. These counts of minimal surfaces can be organised into a two-variable polynomial which is perhaps a known polynomial invariant of the link, such as HOMFLYPT. “Counting minimal surfaces” needs to be interpreted carefully here, similar to how Gromov-Witten invariants “count” J-holomorphic curves. Indeed I will explain how these minimal surface invariants can be seen as Gromov-Witten invariants for the twistor space of hyperbolic 4-space. Whilst Gromov-Witten theory suggests the overall strategy for defining the minimal surface link-invariant, there are significant differences in how to actually implement it. This is because the geometry of both hyperbolic space and its twistor space become singular at infinity. As a consequence, the PDEs involved (both the minimal surface equation and J-holomorphic curve equation) are degenerate rather than elliptic at the boundary. I will try and explain how to overcome these complications. 

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/95847819111?pwd=MVg5dWFsNUpiZWVPL1l4Uk9PV2tZZz09

In this talk, I will explain the construction of a (1+1) spacetime with a wormhole and its conversion into a time-machine spacetime. Then, I will describe a massless scalar quantum field theory in such spacetime. I focus in comparing this quantization of the field in the time-machine spacetime with the quantization on the two-dimensional Einstein cylinder, the emergence of a zero mode and its regularization.

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/94856731951?pwd=MnFNZjlkUHVVWkRRQTIxR0o0TDFnUT09

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/96132106700?pwd=L3ZMOXltZks4Y25abUl5TTdhZTVKUT09

Solar neutrinos are an inevitable background to any dark matter direct detection experiment as they closely mimic the signature of dark matter. In this talk, I will discuss the effects of solar neutrinos on the reach of dark matter-electron scattering experiments, with a focus on semiconductor and xenon-based detectors. In addition, I will present the prospects of measuring and understanding the various solar neutrino components using the same detectors, as well as the effects of non-standard neutrino interactions, thus turning solar neutrinos from a background to an interesting signal in their own right.

Intensity mapping of redshifted 21cm emission from neutral hydrogen holds great promise for learning about cosmology, as it provides an efficient way to map large volumes of the universe without the need to characterize individual luminous sources. The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) is a cylinder telescope located in Western Canada that was custom-built for this purpose, with additional science targets including fast radio bursts, pulsars, and Galactic radio emission. In this talk, I will provide an overview of the design and operational status of the telescope (in the context of the cosmology science case), and then present its first 21cm science results: detection of a cross-correlation between CHIME sky maps and galaxy/quasar catalogs from the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS). In particular, I will discuss our data processing pipeline and how we model the measured signal, as well as the physical implications and prospects for more precise future measurements.