Strong Gravity

We reconsider a gauge theory of gravity in which the gauge group is the conformal group SO(4,2), and the action is of the Yang-Mills form, quadratic in the curvature. The vacuum sector of the resulting gravitational theory exhibits local conformal symmetry. We allow for conventional matter coupled to the spacetime metric as well as matter coupled to the field that gauges special conformal transformations.  When the theory is linearized about flat space, we find there is a long range gravitational force in addition to Newton’s inverse square law.  Furthermore, the cosmological sector of the theory exhibits late time acceleration, an early time bounce, and a post-bounce quasi-de Sitter ``inflationary'' phase of arbitrary duration (without an inflaton).

Aretakis' discovery of a horizon instability of extremal black holes came as something of a surprise given earlier proofs that individual frequency modes are bounded. Is this kind of instability invisible to frequency-domain analysis? The answer is no: We show that the horizon instability can be recovered in a mode analysis as a branch point at the horizon frequency.  We use the approach to generalize to nonaxisymmetric gravitational perturbations and reveal that certain Weyl scalars are unbounded in time on the horizon.  We will also discuss new results showing how the instability manifests for *nearly* extremal black holes: long-lived quasinormal modes collectively give rise to a transient period of growth near the horizon.  This period lasts arbitrarily long in the extremal limit, reproducing the Aretakis instability precisely on the horizon.   We interpret these results in terms of near-horizon geometry and discuss potential astrophysical implications.

Improving the broadband quantum sensitivity of an advanced gravitational wave detector is one of the key steps for future updating of  gravitational wave detectors. Reduction of the broadband quantum noise needs squeezed light with frequency dependent squeezing angle. Current designs for generating frequency dependent squeezed light are based on an ultra-high finesse filter cavity, therefore optical loss will serious contaminate the squeezed light. To circumvent this problem, we  propose an new method for generating a frequency dependent squeezing of quantum noise field quadrature by engineering the quantum entangled field pairs which are filtered through the interferometer arm cavity.  This new method may have the potential to beat the quantum noise by 7dB in recent future.

Questions of nonlinear stability in global AdS space have recently received a significant amount of attention, both as an interesting problem in mathematical general relativity and nonlinear dynamics, and in relation to thermalization studies within the AdS/CFT paradigm. Working with nonlinear perturbation theory (the main technique available for analytic studies in this area) requires a thorough understanding of the properties of linearized AdS fields'

mode functions, which are the fundamental building blocks in perturbative treatments of nonlinearities. While complicated explicit expressions for these mode functions are available in the literature, they hide a good deal of the elegant underlying structure dictated by the AdS symmetries. Extending the mode functions in the flat embedding space (in which the AdS space can be realized as a hyperboloid) results in families of homogeneous polynomials, on which the AdS isometries act in a straightforward manner. This suggests a simple proof of important selection rules in nonlinear perturbation theory.

Studies of multiplet structures of the mode functions furthermore reveal a relation to the Higgs oscillator, a well-known quantum-mechanical superintegrable system. This AdS connection leads to an explicit construction of the hidden symmetry generators for the Higgs oscillator, a long-standing problem in mathematical quantum mechanics.

Current observations provide precise but limited information about inflation and reheating. Theoretical considerations, however, suggest that the early universe might be filled with a large number of interacting fields with unknown interactions.  How can we quantitatively understand the dynamics of perturbations during inflation and reheating in such scenarios and when only limited

constraints are available from observations?   Based on a precise

mapping between particle production in cosmology to resistivity in disordered, quasi one-dimensional wires, I will provide a statistical framework to resolve such seemingly intractable calculations. A number of phenomenon in disordered wires find an analogue in particle production. For example, Anderson localization in quasi one-dimensional wires can be directly mapped to exponential particle production in the early universe. The talk will be focussed on the general framework and some toy examples, though in the end I will discuss possible (future) applications to calculating observables.

Inspired by recent progress into recasting dissipative fluid dynamics within an effective action formalism,

I will show how to embed this problem in holography, where such effective actions can be computed explicitly for the class of relativistic conformal fluids. In particular I will identify the geometric counterpart of certain Goldstone bosons, the light degrees of freedom responsible for the low energy excitations in hydrodynamics. Moreover I will show how the underlying UV Schwinger-Keldysh structure arises at the level of the effective action.

The Advanced LIGO observatories have successfully completed their first science run. Data were collected from September 2015 to January 2016, with a sensitivity a few times better than initial instruments in the hundreds of Hertz band. In this talk I will describe the searches for gravitational-wave transients performed during the first few weeks of the science run. Furthermore, I will describe the methods devised to characterize transient gravitational-wave sources and their applications in the advanced gravitational-wave detector era.

Generation of accurate mock observations tailored specifically to upcoming surveys such as Advanced ACT, CHIME, and LSST is a key technical challenge in cosmology. Traditional approaches involving N-body simulation are fraught with difficulties due to increasingly large survey volumes and depths. Typically, statistical ensembles can only be realized for a few carefully-chosen parameters, limiting exploration to a significantly restricted cosmological model space. We have developed a new massively parallel algorithm to generate accurate halo masses and positions in a fraction (~1e-3 to 1e-2) of the time taken by N-body simulations. I will present a suite of simulated full sky cluster Sunyaev-Zel’dovich maps that have been produced with this approach, and describe the types of virtual large scale structure observations that are now within reach in the coming years.

One possibility for studying reheating is to link the duration and final temperature after reheating, and its equation of state, to inflationary observables. By restricting the equation of state to lie within a broad physically allowed range, one can bracket an allowed range of $n_s$ and $r$ for models of inflation. The results are similar to, but do a little better, than requiring the length of inflation lie between 50 and 60 efolds. The added constraints can help break degeneracies between inflation models that otherwise overlap in their predictions.