Talks

I will present a calculation of the vacuum energy that reproduces the observed value and that points to a completely new understanding of quantum gravity as gravitized quantum theory. In that context the fixed Born rule becomes dynamical. After a short conceptual background, I will discuss experimental consequences of this new viewpoint involving intrinsic triple and higher order quantum interferences that are impossible in quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. Also, I will indicate how the observed masses of quarks and leptons (including predictions for the neutrino masses) as well as their mixing angles could be understood in the same context. At the very end I also plan to comment on a time-varying dark energy as another prediction of quantum gravity viewed as gravitized quantum theory.
[This talk is based on the following papers: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.00901 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.06207 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.19269 ]

The ground state of a bipartite quantum system resembles a thermal state from the perspective of an observer with access to only one of the two regions. This observation has led to the introduction of the entanglement Hamiltonian, which has numerous applications in quantum information and the study of quantum many-body systems.   This talk will explore two approaches to computing the entanglement Hamiltonian: one in the context of quantum field theories (QFTs), focusing on the Bisognano-Wichmann Hamiltonian, and the other for free fermion models on a lattice, where connections with algebraic Heun operators will be highlighted. Additionally, the relationship between the discrete and continuum cases will be examined.

Quantum codes with transversal non-Clifford gates have many applications in fault tolerant quantum computation, from magic state distillation to robust IQP circuit sampling.

In the past year, there has been spectacular progress on constructing such codes with optimal parameter scaling, i.e., constant encoding rate and constant relative distance.
These constructions rely on quantum versions of algebraic geometry codes, which generalise the well-known Reed-Solomon and Reed-Muller codes. In this talk, we will describe one such construction that yields a family of good codes with a transversal control-control-Z gate, and we will highlight some of the remaining open problems in this area.

We consider half BPS operators in maximally supersymmetric Yang Mills (SYM) in p+1 dimensions. These operators satisfy trace relations that are identical to those discussed in the p=3 case (N = 4 SYM). Nevertheless, the bulk explanation of these trace relations must differ from the p = 3 case as their holographic duals are not AdS spacetimes. We identify giant graviton solutions in the dual holographic backgrounds for -1 <= p <= 4. In the ’t Hooft limit, these giants are D(6-p) branes that wrap the internal sphere. We also follow the giants into the strong coupling region where they become other branes. Despite propagating in a non-AdS geometry, we find that the branes “feel” like they are in AdS. This is closely related to the emergent scaling symmetry present in these boundary theories.(based on https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14249)

Measurements of the flavor structure of the Standard Model can be precise probes of physics beyond it. In this talk, we describe two implications of various flavor physics measurements. First, we discuss the use of Froggatt-Nielsen (FN) models for explaining the Standard Model flavor hierarchy. We define wrinkles, extra suppression or enhancement factors which modify the expected scaling of coupling sizes from FN models. We show how wrinkles can change the expected size of couplings to new physics in FN models, and how they naturally appear in various models, as well as discuss the example of the recent B->K\nu\nu measurement. In the second half of this talk, we use a SMEFT approach to illustrate the complementarity between future muon colliders and precision experiments for probing lepton flavor violation.