Talks

Understanding galaxy formation is an outstanding problem in Astrophysics. The feedback processes that drive it, exploding stars and accretion onto supermassive black holes, are poorly understood. This results in an order unity uncertainty in the distribution of the gas inside halos, the ``missing baryon problem''. Because baryons are 15% of the total mass in the universe, this baryonic uncertainty is the largest theoretical systematics for percent precision weak lensing surveys like DES, HSC, Rubin Observatory, Roman Observatory and Euclid.
By measuring the kinematic and thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effects (kSZ and tSZ), high resolution and high sensitivity CMB experiments can solve these issues by measuring the gas thermodynamics in galaxy groups and clusters, at high redshift and out to the outskirts of the halo. I will present joint tSZ, kSZ and dust measurement of BOSS (CMASS) galaxy groups, for which clustering and lensing data is also available. Using data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), we produced the highest significance kSZ measurement to date. This measurement shows with high statistical confidence that the gas is more spread out than the dark matter. It informs the modeling of the CMASS galaxy-galaxy lensing data, and shows that the small-scale ``lensing is low'' tension is not entirely caused by baryonic effects. Finally, comparing the observed kSZ and tSZ to hydrodynamical simulations reveals insight about the modalities of feedback.

In this talk I will describe a new link "invariant" (with certain wall-crossing properties) for links L in a three-manifold M, where M takes the form of a surface times the real line. This link "invariant" is constructed via a map, called the q-nonabelianization map, from the
gl(N) skein algebra of M to the gl(1) skein algebra of a covering three-manifold M'. In the special case of M=R^3, this map computes well-known link invariants in a new way. As a physical application, the q-nonabelianization map computes protected spin character counting BPS ground states with spin for line defects in 4d N=2 theories of class-S. I will also mention possible extension to more general three-manifolds, as well as further physical applications to class-S theories. This talk is based on joint work with Andrew Neitzke, and ongoing work with Gregory Moore and Andrew Neitzke.

Quasars are the most luminous objects in the universe powered by accretion onto supermassive black holes (SMBHs). They can be observed at the earliest cosmic epochs, providing unique insights into the early phases of black hole, structure, and galaxy formation. Observations of these quasars demonstrate that they host SMBHs at their center, already less than ~1 Gyr after the Big Bang. It has been argued that in order to grow these SMBHs in such short amounts of cosmic time, they need to accrete matter over timescales comparable to the age of the universe, and thus the lifetime of quasars - the integrated time that galaxies shine as active quasars - is expected to be of order ~10^9 yr at a redshift of z~6, even if they accrete continuously at the theoretical maximum limit. 

I will present a new method to obtain constraints on the lifetime of high-redshift quasars, based on measurements of the sizes of ionized regions around quasars, known as proximity zones. The sizes of these proximity zones are sensitive to the lifetime of the quasars, because the intergalactic gas has a finite response time to the quasars’ radiation. Applying this method to quasar spectra at z>6, we discover an unexpected population of very young quasars, indicating lifetimes of only ~10,000 years, several orders of magnitude shorter than expected. I will discuss the consequences of such short lifetimes on the quasars' ionizing power, their black hole mass accretion rates, and highlight tensions with current theoretical models for black hole formation. Furthermore, I will present several modifications to the current SMBH formation paradigm that might explain our findings and show how we aim to disentangle the various scenarios by means of future observations with the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, in order to shed new light onto the formation and growth of the first SMBHs in the universe.

We will argue that even with semiclassical gravity, it can be shown that a copy of  all the information on a Cauchy slice resides near the boundary of the slice. We will first demonstrate this in asymptotically global AdS, and then in four-dimensional asymptotically flat space. We will then describe a physical protocol that can be used to verify this property at low-energies and within perturbation theory. This property of gravity implies that information about the black-hole interior is always present "outside" the black hole, which leads to a fresh perspective on the information paradox.

References:
1) https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.02448
2) https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.01740

We reconsider the black hole firewall puzzle, emphasizing that quantum error-correction, computational complexity, and pseudorandomness are crucial concepts for understanding the black hole interior. We assume that the Hawking radiation emitted by an old black hole is pseudorandom, meaning that it cannot be distinguished from a perfectly thermal state by any efficient quantum computation acting on the radiation alone. We then infer the existence of a subspace of the radiation system which we interpret as an encoding of the black hole interior. This encoded interior is entangled with the late outgoing Hawking quanta emitted by the old black hole, and is inaccessible to computationally bounded observers who are outside the black hole. Specifically, efficient operations acting on the radiation, those with quantum computational complexity polynomial in the entropy of the remaining black hole, commute with a complete set of logical operators acting on the encoded interior, up to corrections which are exponentially small in the entropy. Thus, under our pseudorandomness assumption, the black hole interior is well protected from exterior observers as long as the remaining black hole is macroscopic. On the other hand, if the radiation is not pseudorandom, an exterior observer may be able to create a firewall by applying a polynomial-time quantum computation to the radiation.

Abstract: Large N matrix quantum mechanics are central to holographic duality but not solvable in the most interesting cases. We show that the spectrum and simple expectation values in these theories can be obtained numerically via a `bootstrap' methodology. In this approach, operator expectation values are related by symmetries -- such as time translation and SU(N) gauge invariance -- and then bounded with certain positivity constraints. We first demonstrate how this method efficiently solves the conventional quantum anharmonic oscillator. We then reproduce the known solution of large N single matrix quantum mechanics. Finally, we present new results on the ground state of large N two matrix quantum mechanics.

Measurements of gravitational lensing in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) allow the dark matter distribution to be mapped out to uniquely high redshifts. After giving a brief overview of current and upcoming CMB lensing measurements, I will focus on two new ways of using CMB lensing, in combination with galaxy surveys, to constrain the early universe. First, I will explore how CMB lensing and galaxy surveys could provide insights into current discrepancies in measurements of the Hubble constant. Second, I will explain why new approaches to de-lensing – removing the lensing effect to reveal the primordial polarization sky – will be important for probing the early universe with the Simons Observatory CMB experiment.

The axion solution to the strong CP problem also provides a natural dark matter candidate. If the Peccei-Quinn symmetry has ever been restored after inflation, topological defects of the axion field would have formed and produced relic axions, whose abundance is in principle calculable. We study the contribution to the abundance produced by string defects during the so-called scaling regime. Clear evidence of scaling violations is found, the most conservative extrapolation of which strongly suggests a large number of axions from strings. The overall result is a lower bound on the QCD axion mass in the post-inflationary scenario that is substantially stronger than the naive one from misalignment.