Talks

“Saturons" are macroscopic objects that saturate the field theoretic upper bound on microstate degeneracy. Due to their maximal microstate entropy, from a quantum information perspective, saturons and black holes belong to the same universality class with common key properties.  However, as opposed to black holes,  saturons do not require gravity and can emerge via ordinary renormalizable interactions, such as QCD, in the form  of soliton-like states. Due to this feature, saturons serve as laboratories for understanding certain properties of black holes. After reviewing the general properties of saturons, we discuss their implications for fundamental physics and cosmology. In particular, we explain how saturons can lead to a new form of phase transition. 

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Studying galaxy evolution is a human endeavour.  Simulations would ideally include physical models based on relevance, but we are often limited by practical considerations like CPU time and code complexity. I will examine energy inputs to galaxies from radiation and stellar feedback, how they are modeled in simulations, and where they are expected to influence the state of the gas and the overall evolution of a galaxy. I will focus on superbubbles (clustered supernova and stellar wind feedback) and local radiation fields, looking at the differences in what these feedbacks can do in terms of where they act in the galaxy, how that impact changes over cosmic time and how the limitations of simulations have affected our view of them.

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Jets of hadrons produced at high-energy colliders provide experimental access to the dynamics of asymptotically free quarks and gluons and their confinement into hadrons. Motivated by recent developments in conformal field theory, we show that questions of interest in collider physics can be reformulated as the study of correlation functions of a specific class of light-ray operators and their associated operator product expansion (OPE). We show that multi-point correlation functions of these operators can be measured in real collider data, allowing us to experimentally verify the scaling properties associated with the OPE, and providing new insights into the dynamics of the confinement transition.

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