Axions are an exceptionally well-motivated dark matter candidate in addition to being a consequence of the Peccei-Quinn solution to the strong CP problem. ADMX (Axion Dark Matter eXperiment) has recently been selected as the axion search for the US DOE Second-Generation Dark Matter Program. I will discuss the imminent upgrade of ADMX to a definitive search for micro-eV mass dark matter axions as well as the ongoing research and development of new technologies to expand the reach of ADMX to the entire plausible dark matter axion mass range.
By now, both black hole astrophysics and big bang cosmology are empirically well-established disciplines of physics and astronomy. They are also the only circumstances in nature where Einstein's general relativity can be seen in its full glory, and yet contain within them, its eventual and inevitable folly. Here, I will outline subtle lines evidence for why a phenomenologically successful description of big bang cosmology and black hole horizons may be intimately connected. These lines include a holographic description of big bang, thermal tachyacoustic cosmology, and the firewall controversy. Astrophysical observations, ranging from CMB and dark energy probes, to astrophysical neutrinos could shed further light on these potential connections.
Recently, Bravyi and Koenig have shown that there is a tradeoff between fault-tolerantly implementable logical gates and geometric locality of stabilizer codes. They consider locality-preserving operations which are implemented by a constant depth geometrically local circuit and are thus fault-tolerant by construction. In particular, they shown that, for local stabilizer codes in D spatial dimensions, locality preserving gates are restricted to a set of unitary gates known as the D-th level of the Clifford hierarchy. In this paper, we elaborate this idea and provide several extensions and applications of their characterization in various directions. First, we present a new no-go theorem for self-correcting quantum memory. Namely, we prove that a three-dimensional stabilizer Hamiltonian with a locality-preserving implementation of a non-Clifford gate cannot have a macroscopic energy barrier. Second, we prove that the code distance of a D-dimensional local stabilizer code with non-trivial locality-preserving m-th level Clifford logical gate is upper bounded by L^{D+1-m}. For codes with non-Clifford gates (m>2), this improves the previous best bound by Bravyi and Terhal. Third we prove that a qubit loss threshold of codes with non-trivial transversal m-th level Clifford logical gate is upper bounded by 1/m. As such, no family of fault-tolerant codes with transversal gates in increasing level of the Clifford hierarchy may exist. This result applies to arbitrary stabilizer and subsystem codes, and is not restricted to geometrically-local codes. Fourth we extend the result of Bravyi and Koenig to subsystem codes. A technical difficulty is that, unlike stabilizer codes, the so-called union lemma does not apply to subsystem codes. This problem is avoided by assuming the presence of error threshold in a subsystem code, and the same conclusion as Bravyi-Koenig is recovered. This is a joint work with Fernando Pastawski. arXiv:1408.1720
I will review various aspects of field theories that posses a Lifshitz scaling symmetry. I will detail our study of the cohomological structure of anisotropic Weyl anomalies (the equivalent of trace anomalies in relativistic scale invariant field theories). I will also analyze the hydrodynamics of Lifshitz field theories and in particular of Lifshitz superfluids which may give insights into the physics of high temperature superconductors.