Scientific Series

The ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is completing final preparations for first high energy collisions in 2009. This talk will cover: the physics motivation of the LHC, highlights of the ATLAS experiment, commissioning, and prospects for new physics discoveries ahead.

I will report results from simulations of galaxy-scale dark halos of unprecedented numerical resolution. Convergence tests demonstrate detailed convergence for (sub)structures for over six decades in mass, enabling detailed forecasts of the expected dark matter signal both in Earth-bound direct-detection experiments as well as in indirect detection experiments which attempt to image dark matter annihilation radiation in gamma rays.

Varied experimental results have recently sparked theoretical interest in the dark matter sector. I will review some of these results and the basic ideas in particle physics that might explain them, as well as some requirements for those models to work. Then I'll discuss a new model dark matter sector that can better explain many of the experimental results. I'll also mention the interesting cosmological history required in this type of model. Finally, if there's time, I'll discuss ongoing efforts at McGill to develop basic physics shared by many of the new dark matter models.

Brane Tilings are known to describe the largest known class of SCFT's in 3+1 dimensions. There is a well established formalism to find AdS_5 x SE_5 duals to these SCFT's and to compare results on both sides. This talk extends this formalism to 2+1 dimensional SCFT's, living on the world volume of M2 branes, which are dual to AdS_4 x SE_7 backgrounds of M theory. The SCFT's are quiver gauge theories with 4 supercharges (N=2 in 2+1 dimensions) and Chern Simons (CS) couplings. They admit a moduli space of vacuum configurations which is a CY4 cone over SE_7. The talk will go over the formalism and look at several examples in detail. The computation of scaling dimensions will be mentioned and relations to regular toric Fano 3-folds if time permits.

An electroweak model in which the masses of the W and Z bosons and the fermions are generated by quantum loop graphs through a symmetry breaking of the vacuum is investigated. The model is based on a regularized quantum field theory in which the quantum loop graphs are finite to all orders of perturbation theory and the massless theory is gauge invariant, Poincaré invariant, and unitary to all orders. The breaking of the electroweak symmetry SUL(2) × UY (1) is achieved without a Higgs particle. A fundamental energy scale ΛW (not to be confused with a naive cutoff) enters the theory through the regularization of the Feynman loop diagrams. The finite regularized theory with ΛW allows for a fitting of low energy electroweak data. ΛW ~ 542 GeV is determined at the Z pole by fitting it to the Z mass mZ, and anchoring the value of sin²θw to its experimental value at the Z pole yields a prediction for the W mass mW that is accurate to about 0.5% without radiative corrections. The scattering amplitudes for WLWL → WLWL and e+e− → W+L W−L processes do not violate unitarity at high energies due to the suppression of the amplitudes by the running of the coupling constants at vertices. There is no Higgs hierarchy fine-tuning problem in the model. The unitary tree level amplitudes for WLWL → WLWL scattering and e+e− → W+L W−L annihilation, predicted by the finite electroweak model are compared with the amplitudes obtained from the standard model with Higgs exchange. These predicted amplitudes can be used to distinguish at the LHC between the standard electroweak model and the Higgsless model.

The standard cosmological framework explains an impressive range of large-scale astrophysical phenomena, but an agreement between its predictions and the properties of the dark matter halos of nearby galaxies has not been established. In this talk, I will highlight some key observables that constrain galaxy structure and some key differences between cosmological predictions and halo properties inferred from these measurements. I will also discuss proposed 'observational' solutions to some of these discrepancies, such as the role of coherent non-circular motions in spiral galaxies and the measured abundance of gas-rich, starless halos in the nearby Universe.

An astrophysical black hole is completely described with just two parameters: its mass and its dimensionless spin. A few dozen black holes have mass estimates, but until recently none had a reliable spin estimate. The first spins have now been measured for black holes in X-ray binaries.

Suppose we are given two probability distributions on some N-element set. How many samples do we need to test whether the two distributions are close or far from each other in the L_1 norm? This problem known as Statistical Difference has been extensively studied during the last years in the field of property testing. I will describe quantum algorithms for Statistical Difference problem that provide a polynomial speed up in terms of the query complexity compared to the known classical lower bounds. Specifically, I will assume that each distribution can be generated by querying an oracle function on a random uniformly distributed input string. It will be shown that testing whether distributions are orthogonal requires approximately N^{1/2} queries classically and approximately N^{1/3} queries quantumly. Testing whether distributions are close requires approximately N^{2/3} queries classically and O(N^{1/2}) queries quantumly. This is a joint work with Aram Harrow (University of Bristol) and Avinatan Hassidim (The Hebrew University).

Astronomers have discovered many candidate black holes in the universe and have studied their properties in ever-increasing detail. Over the last decade, a few groups have developed observational tests for the presence of event horizons in candidate black holes. The talk will discuss one of these tests, which indicates that the supermassive black hole at the center of our Galaxy must have a horizon.

I will discuss the possibility that a 'Wilson line' degree of freedom can play the role of an inflaton in a warped flux compactification, in the context of the DBI inflationary scenario. I will show how warped DBI Wilson line inflation offers an attractive alternative to ordinary (position field) DBI inflation, inasmuch as observational and theoretical constraints get considerably relaxed. Thus, besides the large non-Gaussianities produced in DBI scenarios, Wilson lines allow for an observable amount of gravitational waves, within consistent approximations.

Over the last two years, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector has been installed in the tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and commissioned to its full functionality. The CMS detector successfully collected beam halo and beam dump data, while the beams were circulating in the LHC in September 2008. After the LHC incident, the commissioning of CMS continued with a one month campaign of continuous cosmic rays data taking at nominal magnetic field. This allowed further tuning of the detector, consolidation of its operation and characterization of its performances. In this talk, the status of the CMS detector and its performance, in view of LHC collisions in 2009, will be described.