Scientific Series

Inflation may have occurred at energies up to 10^16 GeV, far beyond the reach of any terrestrial collider. The "cosmological collider" program seeks to extract the mass spectrum and spin content of particles present during inflation from non-Gaussian correlators. Forthcoming large-scale structure…

Higher-curvature gravity can offer UV completions of GR, but generically suffers from 4th-order propagating degrees of freedom often spoiling unitarity, e.g. Stelle gravity. Recently it was noticed that “Einsteinian gravities” allow for higher curvature interactions match Einstein’s spectrum at the…

The Generalized Quantum Stein's Lemma is a theorem in quantum hypothesis testing that provides an operational meaning to the relative entropy within the context of quantum resource theories. Its original proof was found to have a gap, which led to a search for a corrected proof. We formalize the…

I will revisit matrix string theory as a possibly non-perturbative formulation of the superstring S-matrix, and discuss its implications and tests

We derive a cutting rule for equal-time in-in correlators, including cosmological correlators based on Keldysh r/a basis, which decomposes diagrams into fully retarded functions and cut-propagators consisting of Wightman functions. Our derivation relies only on basic assumptions such as unitarity…

As part of deepening my background in Loop Quantum Gravity, I will give a brief introduction to the canonical formulation of the theory. I will outline the motivation for choosing appropriate classical variables—specifically the Ashtekar–Barbero connection and densitized triad—and explain how these…

Local indistinguishability - often called "quantum nonlocality without entanglement" (QNLWE) - describes the counterintuitive situation where orthogonal product states cannot be discriminated by local operations and classical communication (LOCC). Kunjwal and Baumeler [PRL 131, 120201 (2023)] showed…

I will explain a recent joint work with A. Shapiro in which we prove that the quantized K-theoretic BFN Coulomb branch ring associated to a quiver gauge theory is isomorphic to a quantum upper cluster algebra, when the gauge theory quiver is without 1-cycles. The new ingredient needed to upgrade our…

We study subregion algebras in classical and perturbative quantum gravity on half-spaces of event horizons. We construct half-sided supertranslation generators by extending subregion phase spaces of the event horizon to include doubled pairs of edge modes obtained from splitting the horizon. These…

I will revisit the canonical quantization of General Relativity in the self-dual formulation in the presence of a cosmological constant, discussing the normalizability of graviton states over the de Sitter spacetime. Time permitting, I will explain how the physics of the Hamiltonian constraint is…

Physics has been driven by the discovery of novel phases of matter, largely in materials. Recently, the advent of both quantum error correction and machine learning, viewed as physical phenomena, has compelled us to revisit the notion of a phase itself. I will show how decodable/undecodable regimes…

I will review the recent surge of interest in finding quantum microstates of black holes, under the name of black hole cohomologies or fortuity. I will go over the progress in the 4d N=4 Super-Yang-Mills with gauge groups SU(2), SU(3) and SU(4), introduce related studies in other theories such as…