Talks

Quantum theory is the most accurate scientific theory humanity has ever devised. But it is also the most mysterious. No one knows what the underlying picture of reality at quantum level is. This presentation will introduce you to some of the many interpretations of quantum theory that scientists have devised and discuss the infamous 'measurement problem'.

Violation of local realism can be probed by theory–independent tests, such as Bell’s inequality experiments. There, a common assumption is the existence of perfect, classical, reference frames, which allow for the specification of measurement settings with arbitrary precision. However, if the reference frames are ``bounded'', only limited precision can be attained. We expect then that the finiteness of the reference frames limits the observability of genuine quantum features. Using spin coherent states as reference frames, we determined their minimal size necessary to violate Bell’s inequalities in entangled systems ranging from qubits to macroscopic dimensions. In the latter, the reference frame’s size must be quadratically larger than that of the system. Lacking such large reference frames, precludes quantum phenomena from appearing in everyday experience.

We understand the history of our universe very well but remain ignorant on one key question: what is most of the universe actually made of? Beautiful measurements, by satellites, balloon-basted observatories, the Hubble telescope and ground-based telescopes have allowed us to accurately trace this history of the history of the ordinary matter we are made of. Yet these measurements also show us that most of the universe is dark - that is to say it cannot be seen visibly no matter how bright a light is shone on it. I will discuss why we think that 95% of the universe is dark and will show how we are trying to directly observe dark matter. I will explain what it is like to do science underground and why we need to be so deep to make these measurements.

Physics emerged from the twentieth century with two remarkably successful descriptions of nature which stand in striking contrast. Quantum mechanics describes the subatomic realm with intrinsic uncertainties and probabilities. On the other hand, Einstein's general relativity describe gravitational phenomena in an exacting geometric arena. Theoretical physicists have struggled for over fifty years trying to combine these views in a single unified framework. More recently, superstring theory has drawn a huge amount of interest as a leading contender to provide such a unification. Superstring theory is a theory of strings, branes, extra spacetime dimensions and much more. In my lecture, I will try to give a flavour for what superstring theory is all about and why physicists, like myself, continue to be so excited about this, perhaps the final theory.

The Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) are the latest weapon in the quest for precision cosmology and dark energy. Many presentations on BAO are complicated and unclear and I will therefore present BAO with particular emphasis on trying to give the simplest theoretical description, both at the linear and nonlinear level, and will describe some of the observational challenges to measuring BAO.

Recently there has been renewed interest in cosmological gravity, namely 3d gravity coupled to a Chern-Simons term with parameter $\mu$, following claims that at $\mu =1$ the theory becomes chiral and stable. In this talk we will investigate cosmological gravity by setting up a concrete holographic dictionary with a dual 2d field theory and we will demonstrate that the theory is in fact not chiral in the limit $\mu = 1$. Instead our holographic dictionary implies that at $\mu =1$ the dual field theory becomes a logarithmic CFT (LCFT). Our results resolve confusions in the earlier literature and the resulting new class of holographic dualities involving LCFTs may have interesting applications to strongly correlated condensed matter systems.

Cosmological bubble collisions arising from first order phase transitions are a generic consequence of the Eternal Inflation scenario. I will present our computational strategy for generating and evolving these bubbles in 3+1 dimensions and in a self-consistently expanding background. I will show the existence of classical field transitions--the classical nucleation of bubbles during collisions--which can dramatically alter the canonical description of eternal inflation.

We propose a holographic description of four dimensional single scalar inflationary universes, in particular asymptotically de Sitter cosmologies and power-law inflation. We show how cosmological observables such as the primordial power spectrum and non-gaussianities are encoded in correlation functions of a three dimensional QFT.