Already the last decade has
witnessed unprecedented progress in the collection of cosmological data.
Presently proposed and designed future cosmological probes and surveys permit
us to anticipate the upcoming avalanche of cosmological information during the
next decades.
The increase of valuable observations needs to be accompanied with the development
of efficient and accurate information processing technology in order to analyse
and interpret this data. In particular, cosmography projects, aiming at studying
the origin and inhomogeneous evolution of
the Universe, involve high dimensional inference methods. For example, 3d
cosmological density and velocity field inference requires to explore on the
order of 10^7 or more parameters. Consequently, such projects critically rely
on state-of-the-art information processing techniques
and, nevertheless, are often on the verge of numerical feasibility with present
day computational resources. For this reason, in this talk I will address
the problem of high dimensional Bayesian inference from cosmological data
sets, subject to a variety of statistical and systematic uncertainties. In
particular, I will focus on the discussion of selected Markov Chain Monte Carlo
techniques, permitting to efficiently solve inference problems with on the
order of 10^7 parameters. Furthermore, these methods will be exemplified in
various cosmological applications, raging from 3d non-linear density and photometric
redshift inference to 4d physical state inference. These techniques permit us
to exploit cosmologically relevant information from
observations to unprecedented detail and hence will significantly contribute to
the era of precision cosmology.
In
this talk, I will construct a symmetry protected topological phase of bosons in
3d with particle number conservation and time reversal symmetries, which is the
direct bosonic analogue of the familiar electron topological insulator. The
construction employs a parton decomposition of bosons, followed by condensation
of parton-monopole composites. The surface of the resulting state supports a
gapped symmetry respecting phase with intrinsic toric code topological order
where both e and m anyons carry charge 1=2.
It
is well-known that one signature of the 3d electron topological insulator is
the Witten
eect:
if the system is coupled to a compact electromagnetic gauge eld, a monopole in
the
bulk acquires a half-odd-integer polarization charge. I will discuss the
corresponding
phenomenon
for the constructed topological insulator of bosons: a monopole can remain
electrically
neutral, but its statistics are transmuted from bosonic to fermionic. This
\sta-
tistical
Witten eect" guarantees that the surface is either gapless, symmetry
broken or
carries
an intrinsic topological order.
The endgame of massive star evolution is the gravitational-induced collapse of the central inert iron core. The collapse of the core continues until the matter reaches nuclear densities where the strong force between nucleons becomes dominant and provides sufficient pressure to stabilize the newly formed protoneutron star. What ensues is a complex multi-physics problem involving strong gravity, multidimensional hydrodynamic instabilities, magnetic fields, multispecies neutrino radiation, and supranuclear density physics to name a few.
We expect that most massive stars end this final stage of stellar evolution with a successful core-collapse supernova explosion. However, we also know that some of these core collapse events must fail and form stellar mass black holes.In his talk I will touch on two of the most important questions in core-collapse supernovae theory. I will briefly talk about what conditions are favourable for failed core-collapse supernovae (i.e. black hole formation). Conversely, I will discuss recent results from full three-dimensional, general-relativistic simulations of core-collapse and the implications for our understanding of the core-collapse supernova mechanism. If time permits, I'll discuss how neutrinos from the next galactic core-collapse supernova can help constrain properties of massive stars.
A circuit obfuscator is an algorithm that translates
logic circuits into functionally-equivalent similarly-sized logic circuits that
are hard to understand. While ad hoc obfuscators have been implemented, theoretical
progress has mainly been limited to no-go results. In this work, we propose a
new notion of circuit obfuscation, which we call partial indistinguishability.
We then prove that, in contrast to previous definitions of obfuscation, partial
indistinguishability obfuscation can be achieved by a polynomial-time
algorithm. Specifically, our algorithm re-compiles the given circuit using a
gate that satisfies the
relations of the braid group, and then reduces to a braid
normal form. Variants of our obfuscation algorithm can be applied to both classical
and quantum circuits.
Two-dimensional
models provide for a very attractive playground being a theory imitating some
of the main features of QCD. Those include the asymptotic freedom, mass gap,
confinement, chiral symmetry breaking and others. Furthermore, there is a correspondence between the spectra of
four-dimensional SQCD and N=(2,2) CP(N-1) sigma model which was discovered more
than a decade ago. This correspondence was explained later when it was found
that SQCD supports non-Abelian strings with confined monopoles. The kinks of
the two-dimensional theory are the monopoles attached to the strings. Thus,
analysis of two-dimensional sigma models gives a deeper insight into the four-dimensional SQCD, in particular,
into its strong dynamics.
We study the BPS spectrum of the N=(2,2) CP(N-1) model with the Z_N-symmetric
twisted mass terms. We focus on analysis of the "extra'' towers of states
found previously and compare them to the states that can be identified in the
quasiclassical domain. Exact analysis of the strong-coupling states shows that
not all of them survive when passing to the weak-coupling domain. Some of the states decay on
the curves of the marginal stability (CMS). Thus, most of the strong coupling
states do not exist at weak coupling and cannot be classified quasiclassically.
This result lifts to four dimensions. In terms of the four-dimensional theory,
the "extra" states are the strong coupling dyons, while the
quasiclassical bound states are the bound states of dyons and quarks.
In the past few years, optical
cooling and manipulating of macroscopic objects, such as micro-mirrors and
cantilevers has developed into an active field of research.
In mechanical systems, the oscillator is attached to its suspension,
a thermal contact that limits the motion isolation. On the other hand, when
these small objects are levitated using the radiation pressure force of lasers,
the excellent thermal isolation even at room temperatures helps produce
very sensitive force detectors, and eventually quantum transducers for quantum
computation purposes. These new techniques may have a variety of applications
for fundamental physics such as short distance tests of gravity and
gravitational wave detection at high frequencies. In addition, there are
several proposals suggesting that optically levitated dielectrics can be cooled
to the ground state of the center of mass motion, opening the exciting
possibility of creating macroscopic matter-wave interferometers.
Quantum key distribution protocols can be based on
quantum error correcting codes, where the structure of the code determines the
post processing protocol applied to a raw key produced by BB84 or a similar
scheme. Luo and Devetak showed that
basing a similar protocol on entanglement-assisted quantum error-correcting
codes (EAQECCs) leads to quantum key expansion (QKE) protocols, where some
amount of previously shared secret key is used as a seed in the post-processing
stage to produce a larger secret key. One of the promising aspects of EAQECCs
is that they can be constructed from classical linear codes that don't satisfy
the dual-containing property, which among other things allows the use of low
density parity-check (LDPC) codes with girth greater than 4, for which the
iterative decoding algorithm has better performance. We looked into QKE based on a family of
EAQECCs generated by classical finite geometry (FG) LDPC codes. Very efficient iterative decoders exist for
these codes, and they were shown by Hsieh, Yen and Hau to produce quantum LDPC
codes that require very little entanglement.
We modify the original QKE protocol to detect bad code blocks without
the consumption of secret key when the protocol fails. This allows us to greatly reduce the bit
error rate of the key, at the cost of a minor reduction in the net key
production rate, but without increasing the consumption rate of pre-shared
key. Numerical simulations for the
family of FG LDPC codes show that this improved QKE protocol has a good net key
production rate even at relatively high error rates, for appropriate code
choices.
Black holes are the elementary particles of gravity, the
final state of sufficiently massive stars and of energetic collisions. With a
forty-year long history, black hole physics is a fully-blossomed field which
promises to embrace several branches of theoretical physics. Here I review the
main developments in highly dynamical black holes with an emphasis on high
energy black hole collisions and probes of particle physics via superradiance.
I discuss several recent efforts
in relating string field theory calculations of BMN BMN BMN and BMN BMN BPS
correlation functions to direct perturbative calculations and
integrability-assisted methods. I review the next-to-leading order agreement
between strings and perturbation theory in the SO(6) sector, a conjectured
extension of the integrability techniques by Escobedo, Gromov, Sever, Vieira from
the SU(2) to the full SO(6) sector and agreement with SFT and PT in it at the
leading order; finally, I discuss the issue of equating exactly extremal and
non-extremal correlators at NLO in the integrability-assisted calculation.
Physics
is at a crossroad that leads either to Naturalness or the Multiverse. While the
confirmation of gauge coupling unification in the early 90s gave a tremendous
boost to naturalness and to low energy SUSY, the lack of evidence
for new physics beyond the standard model at the LHC points to a paucity of new
particles near the weak scale. This suggests that the weak scale is tuned and
that supersymmetry, if present at all, is realized at higher energies. This
points to Split SUSY, a framework motivated by the String Landscape. Fine-tuning
electroweak symmetry breaking and the renormalization group evolution of
the scalar masses constrains Split model building and I review the expectations
at the LHC for the different possible Split SUSY particle spectra.