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It has been conjectured that the gravitational interaction may arise as an entropic force rather than as a result of virtual quanta exchange of a fundamental field. In this talk I will present a set of microscopic quantum models which realize this idea in detail. I will describe a simple mechanism by which Newton’s law of gravity arises from the extremization of the free energy of a collection of qubits. I will show both a local and non-local model version of the construction and discuss how to distinguish these entropic models from ordinary perturbative quantum gravity using existing observations and near term experiments. Based on 2502.17575 with Daniel Carney, Thilo Scharnhorst, Roshni Singh and Jacob M. Taylor.

Vertex operator algebras (VOAs) arise in many corners of supersymmetric quantum field theory. One particularly influential instance is in 4d N=2 superconformal field theories, whereby the VOA is realized as the cohomology of a suitable supercharge. Unitarity of the underlying SCFT imposes strong constraints on the structure of the resulting VOA. In this talk, I will describe one aspect of how the unitary of the underlying SCFT constrains this VOA: in the context of superconformal gauge theories, the resulting BRST complex shares a striking resemblance to the de Rham complex of a compact Kähler manifolds. I will finish with several consequences of this observation, e.g. the formality of these BRST complexes as in the work of Deligne-Griffiths-Morgan-Sullivan on compact Kähler manifold. This is based on work in progress with C. Beem.