Talks

I discuss how quantum mechanical effects prevent violations of causality in low energy processes, even when faster-than-light propagation is possible. At the classical level, faster-than-light propagation can be used to build "time-machine" configurations that violate causality. However, low-energy quantum excitations propagating on these backgrounds lead to divergent backreaction through loop effects. These divergences fully probe the UV dynamics of the system, making it impossible to prepare and describe causality violating configurations in the regime of validity of effective field theory. In light of these results, I conclude that effective field theories with negative Wilson coefficients or Galileon-symmetric interactions are not in tension with causality, despite leading to faster-than-light propagation.

While quantum correlations between two spacelike-separated systems are fully encoded by the bipartite density operator associated with the joint system, what operator encodes quantum correlations across space and time? I will describe the general theory of such "quantum states over time" as well as a canonical example that encodes the expectation values of certain observables measured sequentially in time. The latter extends the theory of pseudo-density matrices to arbitrary dimensions, not necessarily restricted to multi-qubit systems. In addition, quantum states over time admit a natural proposal for a general-purpose quantum Bayes' rule. Our results specialize to many well-studied examples, such as the state-update rule, the two-state vector formalism and weak values, and the Petz recovery map. This talk is based on joint work with James Fullwood and the two papers: arXiv: 2212.08088 [quant-ph] and 2405.17555 [quant-ph].

Hot viscous plasmas unavoidably emit a gravitational wave background, similar to electromagnetic black body radiation. In this talk we will discuss the contribution from hidden particles to the diffuse background emitted by the primordial plasma in the early universe. While this contribution can easily dominate over that from Standard Model particles, both are capped by a generic upper bound that makes them difficult to detect with interferometers in the foreseeable future. We will illustrate our results on the examples of axion-like particles and heavy neutral leptons. We will also discuss how this bound affects the previous estimates of gravitational wave backgrounds from particle decays out of thermal equilibrium.

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