Talks

The presence of an instability in the Standard Model Higgs potential may have important implications for inflation and the viability of our Universe. In particular, if the Hubble scale during inflation is comparable to (or larger than) the instability scale of the potential, quantum fluctuations in the Higgs field will lead to the Higgs sampling the unstable part of the potential during inflation. However, to correctly study transitions to the unstable regime and determine the significance for the resulting universe requires addressing a number of subtleties. I will discuss these subtleties and a variety of possible approaches to studying Higgs evolution during inflation. By considering both (1) the evolution of Higgs fluctuations in the Gaussian approximation and (2) a perturbative calculation of the fluctuation two-point correlation function, I aim to elucidate how to address these issues in a consistent, physical way. The insight provided by these approaches will set the scene for studying Higgs fluctuations via the Fokker-Planck (FP) approach, which captures the non-Gaussian nature of the field. As such, it provides information about the rare—but, in terms of the fate of our Universe, potentially extremely important—patches that experience particularly large fluctuations.

For isolated quantum systems fluctuation theorems are commonly derived within the two-time energy measurement approach. In this talk we will discuss recent developments and studies on generalizations of this approach. We will show that concept of fluctuation theorems is not only of thermodynamic relevance, but that it is also of interest in quantum information theory. In a second part we will show that the quantum fluctuation theorem generalizes to PT-symmetric quantum mechanics with unbroken PT-symmetry. In the regime of broken PT-symmetry the Jarzynski equality does not hold as also the CPT-norm is not preserved during the dynamics. These findings will be illustrated for an experimentally relevant system ? two coupled optical waveguides. It turns out that for these systems the phase transition between the regimes of unbroken and broken PT-symmetry is thermodynamically inhibited as the irreversible work diverges at the critical point. The discussion will be concluded with an alternative approach to fluctuation theorems and quantum entropy production in quantum phase space.

Galileons are higher-derivative effective field theories with curious properties which have attracted much recent interest among cosmologists.  I will review their origins, their properties, their generalizations, and some recent developments.

This talk touches on three questions regarding the ontological status of quantum states using the ontological models

framework: it is assumed that a physical system has some underlying ontic state and that quantum states correspond to probability distributions over these ontic states.

The first question is whether or not quantum states are necessarily real---that is, whether or not the distributions for different quantum states must be disjoint. The PBR theorem proves the reality of quantum states by making assumptions about the ontic structure of bipartite systems, assumptions that have been challenged. Recent work has therefore concentrated on single systems, producing theorems proving the existence of pairs of quantum states whose overlap region on the ontic state space is very small.

The second question is whether the ontology of a quantum system can be macro-realist---that is, can there be "macroscopic" quantities which always have determinate values? The Leggett-Garg inequalities claim to rule out this possibility, but this conclusion has been disputed.

The third question is less familiar: Must quantum superpositions be ontic? That is, for some superposition with respect to some orthonormal basis, must ontic states exist which can be obtained by preparing the superposition, but not by preparing any of the basis states? In other words, can Schrödinger's cat always be either alive xor dead?

Calculations in General Relativity inevitably involve tricky manipulations of tensor equations. In many cases, the tensor algebra involved is at best tedious and fraught with error, and at worst impossible. It is, however, ideally suited to implementation in a computer algebra system such as Mathematica. In this talk I will show how the xAct tensor algebra package can be used to make light work of difficult tensor calculations. I will illustrate its wide-reaching functionality using applications in my own research, with relevance to black hole perturbations, numerical relativity and quantum gravity.