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I describe recent progress on a program of research aimed at finding a simultaneous completion of quantum mechanics and general relativity, while also addressing the question of how the universe chose its effective laws out of a vast landscape of possible laws.    This is based on a few principles:   time in the sense of causation is fundamental, as are events, and the views  of events (their backward celestial spheres.) Further the view of every event must be distinct from that of every other.  This is enforced by a choice for potential energy that maximizes the diversity of views of events, called the variety.    Given these postulates, everything else emerges dynamically, including space, spacetime, and quantum dynamics; as the variety turns out to reduce appropriately to Bohm’s quantum potential, which in turn is responsible for quantum non-locality, entanglement etc.  

A consequence of these ideas is that the effective low energy laws, including the values of the dimensionless constants of the standard model,  should evolve dynamically.    I present three realizations of this idea: cosmological natural selection (1992), the principle of precedence (2005), and the hypothesis that the universe may learn how to choose its vacuum out of a landscape of possible vacua through a process formally analogous to machine learning (2021).   I discuss the prospects for observational tests of these ideas.

At the technical level,  some of these ideas are related through the use of matrix modes whose actions are cubic in the matrices, which are tied to topological and gravitational theories.  At a methodological level, issues involving an interplay of reductionist and functionalist reasoning may be discussed.  

Collaborators on recent work include Stephon Alexander, Marina Cortes, William Cunningham,  Stuart Kauffman, Jaron Lanier,  Andrew Liddle,  Joao Magueijo,   Stefan Stanojevic,  Michael W. Toomey, Clelia Verde and Dave Wecker.

I will discuss what happens when a black hole captures a much larger in
size cosmic string loop. In some cosmological scenarios, such encounters
are not unlikely for supermassive black holes in galactic nuclei, and
for primordial black holes. The talk will feature some fun physics and
geometry: non-flat quadrilaterals, black-hole superradiance,
one-dimensional geometric flows, and persistent ultra-relativistic
gravitational-wave whips.

Agency accounts of causation are often criticised as being unacceptably subjective: if there were no human agents there would be no causal relations, or, at the very least, if humans had been different then so too would causal relations. Here we describe a model of a causal agent that is not human, allowing us to explore the latter claim.   

Our causal agent is special kind of open, dissipative physical system, maintained far from equilibrium by a low entropy source of energy, with accurate sensors and actuators. It has a memory to record sensor measurements and actuator operations, and a learning system that can access the sensor and actuator records to learn and represent the causal relations. We claim that causal relations are relations between the internal sensor and actuator records and the causal concept inherent in these correlations is then inscribed in the physical dynamics of the internal learning machine. We use this model to examine the relationships between three familiar asymmetries aligned with causal asymmetry: time's arrow, the thermodynamic arrow and the arrow of deliberation and action. We consider both classical and quantum agent models and illustrate some differences between the two. 
 

From dark matter to the strong CP problem to the dynamics behind the weak scale, a variety of observations make for a compelling case that the Standard Model is an incomplete description of subatomic physics. Yet none of these puzzles provides unambiguous guidance on how we should proceed to find what comes next.

I will argue that this state of affairs calls for a multi-directional strategy in our quest for physics Beyond-the-Standard-Model. Only a combination of new theoretical developments and original ideas, confronted with the vast array of experiments at our disposal, will provide us with the big picture we need to move beyond.

A remarkable aspect of 4-dimensional complexified General Relativity (GR) is that it can be non-trivially deformed: there exists an infinite-parameter set of modifications with the same degree of freedom count. It is trivial to impose reality conditions that lead to real theories with Euclidean or split signature, but the situation is more complicated and not yet fully understood in the Lorentzian case, which is the subject of this talk. I will first show that the choice of potentially consistent reality conditions is essentially unique and boils down to the reality of the underlying 3-metric at the canonical level, as in the case of GR. For simplicity, I will focus on a subset of modified theories that correspond to a natural extension of Ashtekar's Hamiltonian constraint, namely, a linear combination of EEE, EEB, EBB and BBB. Interestingly, the evolution equations for the 3-metric and its first time-derivative take the same form as in GR, but with an effective stress tensor source which cannot be expressed in terms of these two fields. Modified theories therefore appear as essentially "non-metric" in that they do not admit a closed geometrodynamics form. In particular, this obstructs the conservation of the reality conditions, because the effective source remains complex. Alternatively, if we insist on reality, we obtain extra reality conditions which then leave no room for degrees of freedom. I will finally argue that this should be a generic feature of the Lorenzian modified theories, in stark contrast to their Euclidean and split-signature counterparts.

Combining information from the first gravitational wave detected gamma-ray burst, GRB 170817 with observations of cosmological GRBs holds important lessons for understanding the structure of GRB jets and the required conditions at the emitting region. It also re-frames our understanding of more commonly observed phenomena in GRBs, such as X-ray plateaus, and sets our expectations for future observations. I will present different lines of argument suggesting that efficient gamma-ray emission in GRBs has to be restricted to material with Lorentz factor > 50 and is most likely confined to a narrow region around the core. GRB jets viewed slightly beyond their jet cores, result in X-ray plateaus that are consistent with observed light-curves and naturally reproduce correlations between plateau and prompt emission properties. For jets viewed further off-axis (that are expected to be detected as future GW triggered events) we provide new analytical modelling that reveals two different types of light-curves that could be observed (single or double peaked) and outlines how the underlying physical properties can be recovered from such observations.

To analyze the performance of adaptive measurement protocols for the detection and quantification of state resources, we introduce the framework of quantum preparation games. A preparation game is a task whereby a player sequentially sends a number of quantum states to a referee, who probes each of them and announces the measurement result. The measurement setting at each round, as well as the final score of the game, are decided by the referee based on the past history of settings and measurement outcomes. We show how to compute the maximum average score that a player can achieve under very general constraints on their preparation devices and provide practical methods to carry out optimizations over n-round preparation games. We apply our general results to devise new adaptive protocols for entanglement detection and quantification. Given a set of experimentally available local measurement settings, we provide an algorithm to derive, via convex optimization, optimal n-shot protocols for entanglement detection using these settings. We also present families of adaptive protocols for multiple-target entanglement detection with arbitrarily many rounds. Surprisingly, we find that there exist instances of entanglement detection problems with just one target entangled state where the optimal adaptive protocol supersedes all non-adaptive alternatives.

The understanding of strongly-correlated quantum matter has challenged physicists for decades. The discovery three years ago of correlated phases and superconductivity in magic angle twisted bilayer graphene led to the emergence of a new materials platform to investigate strongly correlated physics, namely moiré quantum matter. These systems exhibit a plethora of quantum phases, such as correlated insulators, superconductivity, magnetism, Chern insulators, and more. In this talk I will review some of the recent advances in the field, focusing on the newest generation of moiré quantum systems, where correlated physics, superconductivity, and other fascinating phases can be studied with unprecedented tunability. I will end the talk with an outlook of some exciting directions in this emerging field.

In recent years quantum error correction(QEC) has become an important part of AdS/CFT. Unfortunately, there are no field-theoretic arguments about why QEC holds in known holographic systems. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap by studying the error-correcting properties of the fermionic sector of various large N theories. Specifically, we examine SU(N) matrix quantum mechanics and 3-rank tensor O(N)^3 theories. Both of these theories contain large gauge groups. We argue that gauge singlet states indeed form a quantum error-correcting code. Our considerations are based purely on large N analysis and do not appeal to a particular form of Hamiltonian or holography. Based on: arXiv: 2008.12869

Models of Dark Matter (DM) can leave unique imprints on the Universe's small scale structure by boosting density perturbations on small scales. We study the capability of Pulsar Timing Arrays to search for, and constrain, subhalos from such models. The models of DM we consider are ordinary adiabatic perturbations in ΛCDM, QCD axion miniclusters, models with early matter domination, and vector DM produced during inflation.

Recently, the notion of symmetry has been extended from 0-symmetry described by group to higher symmetry described by higher group. In this talk, we show that the notion of symmetry can be generalized even further to "algebraic higher symmetry". Then we will describe an even more general point of view of symmetry, which puts the (generalized) symmetry charges and topological excitations at equal footing: symmetry can be viewed gravitational anomaly, or symmetry can be viewed as shadow topological order in one higher dimension.