Scientific Series

"Low-energy" experiments involving atoms and/or nuclei have deep connections to open questions in particle physics: the nature of dark matter, the origin of neutrino mass, and CP-violation in the lepton sector. Processes of interest include neutrino-nucleus scattering, coherent muon conversion on…

In this talk, I will survey joint work with Dmitri Pavlov on the construction and classification of extended geometric functorial field theories. After briefly reviewing some background and classical definitions, I will discuss the construction of the extended geometric bordism category and present…

When a compact object collapses to form a black hole, quantum field theory predicts the emission of an energy outflux to future null infinity, which later relaxes to Hawking radiation. Within the semiclassical framework, we derive a simple, closed form, analytical expression for the energy outflux…

This colloquium is presented in collaboration with the Physics of Quantum Information II conference.

Ultralight scalar fields present a compelling dark matter candidate that can imprint potential signatures on observables spanning from the early Universe to today. In this talk, I will explore the implications of scalar dark matter that couples quadratically to the Standard Model. Such couplings…

The interpretation of dark matter detection experiments crucially depends on our understanding of the phase space of dark matter in the Milky Way (MW) locally, and up to the edge of the dark matter halo. A precise construction of the `entire' MW rotation curve (RC) is paramount in estimating…

Recent work on identifying a canonical analogue of Bayes’ rule in the quantum regime has produced a variety of proposals that both recover classical Bayesian features and highlight genuinely quantum aspects of state updating under physical transformations. In this talk, we briefly review the main…

We consider the optimization problem (ground energy search) for fermionic Hamiltonians with classical interactions. This QMA-hard problem is motivated by the Coulomb electron-electron interaction being diagonal in the position basis, a fundamental fact that underpins electronic-structure…

In scalar quantum field theory, the causal propagator, which is proportional to the spacetime commutator of the field, plays an essential role. I will discuss some ways the causal propagator and its spectrum have been used to formulate quantum field theory in a more explicitly covariant manner in…

Categorical spectra generalize spectra by allowing each level to be a pointed (∞,∞)-category rather than a space(=(∞,0)-category). After reviewing facts on Gray tensor products and stability of Gray-enriched categories, we will focus on what happens when we ask each level to have adjoints. We will…

Modal quantum theory (MQT) is a toy model based on finite fields that lacks the probability structure of actual quantum theory (AQT). In essence, MQT retains the principle of superposition for quantum states but not unitarity or state normalization. Many familiar "no-go" results in AQT have…