Physics

Experimental constraints on models such as supersymmetry have challenged our assumptions about naturalness, while simultaneously pushing exploration into alternatives that might be more natural. One such scenario is supersymmetry with Dirac...

I will discuss the spectrum of 2d CFTs in the large c limit. In view of holographic CFTs, I will give necessary and sufficient conditions on the light spectrum for a Hawking-Page transition to occur. As examples of candidate holographic CFTs I will...

In the presence of strong magnetic fields, the QCD vacuum may become unstable towards condensation of charged rho mesons, forming a superconducting state. I will talk about our investigation of this possible instability in a well-known holographic...

The fundamental string length explicitly breaks scale invariance. However, in field theory, the gravitational constant, which is directly related to the string length, can be promoted to a dynamical field if the standard model coupled to gravity (SM...

Line operators in class S theories correspond to network operators on the associated Riemann surface. I will describe the algebra of functions on the moduli space of flat SL(N)-connections in terms of a set of networks that are naturally associated...

I will describe recent work explaining how several paradoxical features of bulk locality in AdS/CFT can be explained by interpreting the CFT as a quantum error correcting code. Time permitting I will also present an explicit discrete model of this...

I describe work with Stefan Hollands that establishes a new criterion for the dynamical stability of black holes and black branes with respect to axisymmetric perturbations. Our analysis is done in vacuum general relativity without cosmological...