Talks

This course uses quantum electrodynamics (QED) as a vehicle for covering several more advanced topics within quantum field theory, and so is aimed at graduate students that already have had an introductory course on quantum field theory. Among the topics hoped to be covered are: gauge invariance for massless spin-1 particles from special relativity and quantum mechanics; Ward identities; photon scattering and loops; UV and IR divergences and why they are handled differently; effective theories and the renormalization group; anomalies.

In this talk, I will show that the action of soft graviton operators generates a w(1+infinity) symmetry in gravitational theories minimally coupled to massless and massive scalar matter in 4D asymptotically flat spacetimes.  I will discuss how the symmetry action follows from an infinite tower of soft graviton theorems in momentum space.  By generalizing the previous analyses of w(1+infinity) symmetry in massless amplitudes, these results clarify that the symmetry emerges in 4D asymptotically flat gravitational theories without any additional technical ingredients.  This talk is based on a forthcoming paper with Monica Pate. 

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/91448920819?pwd=cFY0L1JPVFF2bDUwc3JiVlRlbE5ldz09

Searches for dark matter decaying into photons constrain its lifetime to be many orders of magnitude larger than the age of the Universe. A corollary statement is that the abundance of any particle that can decay into photons over cosmological timescales is constrained to be much smaller than the cold dark-matter density. We show that an irreducible freeze-in contribution to the relic density of axions is in violation of that statement in a large portion of the parameter space. This allows us to set stringent constraints on axions in the mass range 100 eV - 100 MeV. 

Zoom Link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/99147137560?pwd=MC81d3h0OE9BZzZQcGpJakVvOFVOQT09

A key challenge for the next decade of survey cosmology is ensuring that the models for summary statistics they measure, such as galaxy clustering and lensing, are sufficiently accurate in light of the high degree of precision of these measurements. A recently proposed class of models, hybrid effective field theory (hybrid EFT), combines perturbation theory-based descriptions of the tracer--matter connection with the nonlinear dark matter distributions produced by cosmological N-body simulations. I will show how hybrid EFT promises to be a powerful model for describing the two-point statistics of clustering and lensing to small scales at high accuracy. I will proceed to survey recent developments in this juncture between simulations and perturbation theory that show their combination is mutually beneficial beyond just modelling two-point statistics.

Zoom link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/93665218297?pwd=T3RLUzRaVDljR2hCNGFxM0l2TVZEdz09

This course uses quantum electrodynamics (QED) as a vehicle for covering several more advanced topics within quantum field theory, and so is aimed at graduate students that already have had an introductory course on quantum field theory. Among the topics hoped to be covered are: gauge invariance for massless spin-1 particles from special relativity and quantum mechanics; Ward identities; photon scattering and loops; UV and IR divergences and why they are handled differently; effective theories and the renormalization group; anomalies.

I will talk about the generalization of Berry classes for quantum lattice spin systems. It defines invariants of topologically ordered states or families thereof. In particular, its equivariant version for 2d gapped states gives the zero-temperature Hall conductance and its various generalizations. I will also discuss the construction of chiral states realizing the topological order associated with a unitary rational vertex operator algebra for which these invariants are non-trivial

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/99910103969?pwd=VlVHVGRiV29iVEFyTXZyR3ovMkRaQT09

The initial conditions of our universe appear to us in the form of a classical probability distribution that we probe with cosmological observations. In the current leading paradigm, this probability distribution arises from a quantum mechanical wavefunction of the universe. In this talk I will discuss how we can adapt flat space bootstrapping techniques to the quantum fluctuations in the early universe, in particular showing that the requirement of unitary time evolution, colloquially the conservation of probabilities, fixes the analytic structure of the wavefunction and of all the cosmological correlators it encodes.

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/95812107239?pwd=bVZMcWdHTVM0Y0tFZGMxS2FCVGF0Zz09

Error-correcting codes were invented to correct errors on noisy communication channels. Quantum error correction (QEC), however, has a wider range of uses, including information transmission, quantum simulation/computation, and fault-tolerance. These invite us to rethink QEC, in particular, the role that quantum physics plays in terms of encoding and decoding. The fact that many quantum algorithms, especially near-term hybrid quantum-classical algorithms, only use limited types of local measurements on quantum states, leads to various new techniques called Quantum Error Mitigation (QEM). We examine the task of QEM from several perspectives. Using some intuitions built upon classical and quantum communication scenarios, we clarify some fundamental distinctions between QEC and QEM. We then discuss the implications of noise invertibility for QEM, and give an explicit construction called Drazin-inverse for non-invertible noise, which is trace-preserving while the commonly-used MoorePenrose pseudoinverse may not be. Finally, we study the consequences of having imperfect knowledge about system noise and derive conditions when noise can be reduced using QEM.

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/91543402893?pwd=b09IS3VWNk5KZi8ya3gzSmRKRFJidz09