Talks

I will introduce the Entanglement Bootstrap, a program to extract and understand the universal information characterizing a state of matter, starting from the local entanglement structure of a single representative state. This universal information is usually packaged in the form of a quantum field theory; the program therefore provides a surprising new perspective on quantum field theory. I will discuss what we can learn about gapped topological phases and their associated topological field theories, and about quantum critical points and their associated conformal field theories.

In this talk I will outline a fundamentally quantum description of bosonic dark matter from which the conventional classical-wave picture emerges when the mass is far below 10 eV. Exploiting fundamental results from quantum optics I will argue that the density matrix for dark matter is explicitly mixed. The formalism provides a continuous description of DM through the wave-particle transition, and using this I show how density fluctuations over various physical scales evolve between the two limits, with a unique behavior for DM emerging near the boundary of the wave and particle descriptions. If time permits, I will briefly describe how these effects would appear in axion haloscopes.

We are now firmly within the ALMA-inspired era of star formation studies. We have abundant high sensitivity and resolution observations of star-disk-outflow systems as well as the ability to perform complex high-resolution plasma astrophysics simulations of their formation. I review recent three-dimensional nonideal MHD simulations that reveal surprising new insights into the role of magnetic fields and magnetic field dissipation in creating outflows, arcs, and cavities on scales of hundreds to thousands of au. Magnetic fields are responsible for a complex inflow-outflow structure around a protostar. I end the talk with results that may answer the longstanding big question in star formation studies: what stops the mass infall on to a protostar?