Scientific Series

 I  will first analytically show a simple, yet subtle "invariance" of two-body decay kinematics for the case of a massless  daughter and a mother particle which is unpolarized and has a *generic* boost distribution in the laboratory frame. Namely, the laboratory frame energy distribution of the massless decay product has a peak, whose location is identical to the  (fixed) energy of that particle in the rest frame of the corresponding mother particle. In turn, this value of the energy is a simple function of the other masses involved in the decay.
As a proof of principle of the usefulness of this observation, I will then apply it for measuring  the mass of the top quark at the LHC, using simulated data (including experimental  effects). In fact, CMS collaboration (in CMS-PAS-TOP-15-002) has recently implemented our method for measuring the top quark mass! Finally, I will show how it can be used to measure all the superpartner masses in a cascade decay chain of the gluino.

The Hartle-Hawking (HH) no-boundary proposal provides a Euclidean path integral prescription for a measure on the space of all possible initial conditions. Apart from  saddle point  and  minisuper-space calculations, it is hard to obtain results using the unregulated path integral. A promising choice of spacetime  regularisation comes from the causal set (CST) approach to quantum gravity.  Using analytic results as well as Markov Chain Monte Carlo and numerical integration methods we obtain  the HH wave function in a theory of non-perturbative 2d CST. We find that the  wave function is sharply peaked with the peak geometry changing discretely with "temperature". In the low temperature regime the peak corresponds to causal sets which have no continuum counterpart but exhibit physically interesting behaviour. They show a rapid spatial expansion with respect to the discrete proper time as well as  a high degree of spatial homogeneity due to extensive overlap of the causal past. While our results are limited to 2 dimensions they provide a concrete example of how quantum gravity could explain the initial conditions for our observable universe.

I'll discuss the two topological twists of 3d N=4 theories, and explain how to understand them in the AKSZ/BV formalism, and how they relate to twists of 4d N =2 theories.  Symplectic duality then takes the form of an equivalence between 3d N=4 theories which interchanges the two topological twists.  I'll also introduce monopole operators and explain the role they play in symplectic duality.

In this talk I will describe numerical constructions of gravitational
duals of theories deformed by localized Dirac delta sources for scalar
operators. We perform two different constructions, one at zero and
the other at nonzero temperature. Surprisingly we find that imposing the preservation of scale
invariance at zero temperature requires the bulk scalar self-interaction potential to be
the one found in a certain Kaluza-Klein compactification of 11D supergravity.
The gravitational setup seems a-priori to be quite unusual and challenging
from the numerical relativity perspective.

Topological aspects of physical systems, including the called topological states of matter, have become hot topics in the frontiers of physics in recent years. Here I would like to present a mathematically "popular" talk for professional physicists for a highlight or overview of how one can systematize knowledge of topological aspects of quantum field theories. Our starting points are Descent Equations and Gauge Structure in Configuration Space in Field Theory. (The audience needs only to know the meaning of "differential forms".)

We derive the constitutive relations of first order charged hydrodynamics for theories with Lifshitz scaling and broken parity in 2+1 and 3+1 spacetime dimensions. In addition to the anomalous (in 3+1) or Hall (in 2+1) transport of relativistic hydrodynamics, there is an additional non-dissipative transport allowed by the absence of boost invariance. We analyze the non-relativistic limit and use a phenomenological model of a strange metal

to argue that these effects can be measured in principle by using electromagnetic fields with non-zero gradients.

I will first briefly report the current status on the stability problem of global AdS space under gravitational self-interaction. I will then present evidence that the possibility of a blackhole-forming instability is strongly connected to phase-locked cascade, which is different from the usual energy cascade in turbulent flow.

Using holography, we study the evolution of a spatially homogeneous, far from equilibrium, strongly coupled N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills plasma with a non-zero charge density or a background magnetic field. This gauge theory problem corresponds, in the dual gravity description, to an initial value problem in Einstein-Maxwell theory with homogeneous but anisotropic initial conditions. We explore the dependence of the equilibration process on different aspects of the initial departure from equilibrium and, while controlling for these dependencies, examine how the equilibration dynamics are affected by the presence of a non-vanishing charge density or an external magnetic field. The equilibration dynamics are remarkably insensitive to the addition of even large chemical potentials or magnetic fields, the equilibration time is set primarily by the form of the initial departure from equilibrium. For initial deviations from equilibrium which are well localized in scale, we formulate a simple model for equilibration times which agrees quite well with our results.

The accumulated intuition from the last decades of research on quantum entanglement is that this phenomenon is highly non-robust, and very hard to maintain in the presence of de-cohering noise at non-zero temperatures. In recent years however, and motivated, in part, by a quest for a quantum analog of the PCP theorem researches have tried to establish, at least in theory, whether or not we can preserve quantum entanglement at "constant" temperatures that are independent of system size. This would imply that any quantum state with energy at most, say 0.05 of the total available energy of the Hamiltonian, would be highly-entangled.

A conjecture formalizing this notion was defined by Freedman and Hastings : called NLTS - it stipulates the existence of locally-defined quantum systems that retain long-range entanglement even at high temperatures. Such a conjecture does not only present a necessary condition for quantum PCP, but also poses a fundamental question on the nature of entanglement itself. To this date, no such systems were found, and moreover, it became evident that even embedding local Hamiltonians on robust, albeit "non-physical" topologies, namely expanders, does not guarantee entanglement robustness.

In this study, refute the intuition that entanglement is inherently fragile: we show that locally-defined quantum systems can, in fact, retain long-range entanglement at high temperatures.  To do this, we construct an explicit family of 7-local Hamiltonians, and prove that for such local Hamiltonians ANY low-energy state is hard to even approximately simulate by low-depth quantum circuits of depth o(log(n)). In particular, this resolves the NLTS conjecture in the affirmative, and suggests the existence of quantum systems whose low-energy states are not only highly-entangled but also "usefully"-entangled, in the computational-theoretic sense. 

In this talk, I will present our latest results on the development of algorithms for computer simulations based on tensor network states (TNS). The major part of this talk is concerned with finite projected entangled pair states (PEPS) in 2D: I will discuss their algorithmic properties as well as their performance for typical benchmark Hamiltonians [1, 2]. A minor part of this talk deals with the question whether TNS methods can be useful for density functional theory (DFT).

[1] M. Lubasch, J. I. Cirac, and M.-C. Ba\~{n}uls, New J. Phys. \textbf{16}, 033014 (2014).

[2] M. Lubasch, J. I. Cirac, and M.-C. Ba\~{n}uls, Phys. Rev. B \textbf{90}, 064425 (2014).

I will discuss the Higgs-branch CFT2 dual to string theory on AdS3 x S3 x T4. States localised near the small instanton singularity can be described in terms of vector multiplet variables.  This theory has a planar, weak-coupling limit, in which anomalous dimensions of single-trace composite operators can be calculated. At one loop, the calculation reduces to finding the spectrum of a spin chain with nearest-neighbour interactions. This CFT2 spin chain matches precisely the one that was previously found as the weak-coupling limit of the integrable system describing the AdS3 side of the duality.  In particual I will show that the one-loop dilatation operator in a non-trivial compact subsector corresponds to an integrable spin-chain Hamiltonian. This provides the first direct evidence of integrability on the CFT2 side of the correspondence.