Archive of IAS Physics Group Meetings

Sep
18
2019

Physics Group Meeting

A brief review of some work on BPS states, wall-crossing, hyperkahler geometry, Hitchin systems, etc.
Greg Moore
1:45pm|Bloomberg Lecture Hall
This talk will give a brief overview focused on six papers written by D. Gaiotto, G. Moore, and A. Neitzke
loosely centered around the topics mentioned in the title. The papers are on the arXiv.
Background reading: Some short reviews are:
https:/...
Sep
11
2019

Physics Group Meeting

Introductory Group Meeting
1:45pm|Bloomberg Hall Physics Library
We will introduce ourselves and give a 2 minute description of what we are interested in at the moment.
The plan for future group meetings is to have some review talks, or topics for discussions. So please think about suggestions for things you...
Jun
12
2019

Physics Group Meeting

The Entanglement Wedge of an Evaporating Black Hole
1:45pm|Bloomberg Hall Physics Library
I will discuss recent work that studies the evolution of the von Neumann entropy of a holographic boundary system dual to an evaporating black hole in AdS. This entropy is computed via the Engelhardt-Wall prescription of extremizing the generalized...
Jun
05
2019

Physics Group Meeting

Geometric Extremization for Supersymmetric $AdS_3$ and $AdS_2$ Solutions
Jerome Gauntlett
1:45pm|Bloomberg Lecture Hall
We consider supersymmetric $AdS_3\times Y_7$ solutions of type IIB supergravity dual to N=(0,2) SCFTs in d=2, as well as $AdS_2\times Y_9$ solutions of D=11 supergravity dual to N=2 supersymmetric quantum mechanics, some of which arise as the near...
May
15
2019

Physics Group Meeting

Two Important Milestones in the History of the Universe: The Last Scattering Surface, the Black Body Photosphere of the Universe and Distortions of the CMB Spectrum
1:45pm|Bloomberg Lecture Hall
Our Universe is filled with Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation having an almost perfect black body spectrum with a temperature of To=2.7K. The number density of photons in our Universe exceeds the number density of electrons by a factor of...
Apr
24
2019

Physics Group Meeting

The Current State of Gravitational Wave Searches with LIGO/VIRGO
1:45pm|Bloomberg Lecture Hall
The LIGO/VIRGO collaboration has just started their observing run 3. I will first give an introduction to gravitational wave searches and the events that have been found so far and describe some of the interesting astrophysics problems that might be...
Mar
27
2019

Physics Group Meeting

Supersymmetry, Self-Force, and the Swampland
Tom Rudelius
1:45pm|Bloomberg Hall Physics Library
Motivated by an apparent counterexample to the Weak Gravity Conjecture, I will describe the difference between black hole extremality bounds and BPS bounds and (relatedly) the difference between superextremal particles and self-repulsive particles...
Mar
20
2019

Physics Group Meeting

Aspects of One-matrix Integrals
1:45pm|Bloomberg Hall Physics Library
I will review the perturbative (genus) expansion of one-matrix integrals via the loop equations, and the streamlined version due to Eynard. I will review double-scaled matrix integrals and discuss a heuristic method for computing some...
Mar
13
2019

Physics Group Meeting

Formation of compact structures with axion dark matter
1:45pm|Bloomberg Hall Physics Library
Light scalar dark matter fields can exhibit several interesting aspects to their cosmological evolution. I will focus mostly on structure formation with ultralight axions and with the QCD axion. The standard scenario leads to a suppression of...
Feb
27
2019

Physics Group Meeting

6D Spinor-helicity and Superamplitudes
1:45pm|Bloomberg Hall Physics Library
I will give a review of recent progress in studying 6D SYM and supergravity amplitudes. Based on the spinor-helicity formalism of Cheung and O'Connell, recent work has shown that superamplitudes in 6D have a simple and compact form, not unlike 4D...