Scientific Series

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…

One of the most fundamental questions that can be asked when studying any physical theory is: What are its true degrees of freedom? These modes are the building blocks of theories, which can evolve and be observed, shaping how a theory connects to the physical Universe. Finding them, however, is not…

Deep generative models are emerging as powerful tools for solving physics problems, enabling new approaches to inference, sampling, anomaly detection, and signal reconstruction. In the first part of the talk, I will discuss how generative models, designed with physical principles such as symmetry…

Various operations on two-dimensional quantum field theories such as the GSO projection and various dualities involve a sum over spin structures. This talk will discuss a subtle mod-16 anomaly in the spin structure, extending the usual mod-8 anomaly of fermion parity, which can obstruct this sum. As…