IAS High Energy Theory Seminar

On-shell methods have found a new application to local observables such as asymptotic radiation fields and gravitational waveforms. While these observables are invariant under small gauge transformations, they are known to depend on a choice of...

On general grounds one expects that global symmetries are absent in quantum gravity. We discuss some aspects of this issue, focusing on the recently proposed Swampland Cobordism Conjecture, and related conjectures connected with completeness of the...

I will describe the relationship between the Schur indices of 4d N=2 SQFTs of class S and the quantization of Chern-Simons theory with complex gauge group.

Correlation functions of the average null energy operator provide direct theoretical models of collider experiments, and have played a crucial role in contemporary developments in formal QFT and gravity. Recently it has become possible to directly...

In the search for simple, solvable models of quantum cosmology it is useful to focus on general relativity in 2+1 dimensions, where - due to the absence of local degrees of freedom - there is some hope that we can say something precise.  I will...

Muon colliders offer a unique path to multi-TeV, high-luminosity lepton collisions. Muon collisions with a center-of-mass energy of 10 TeV or above would offer significant discovery potential where the constituent collision energies exceed those of...

Matroids are combinatorial abstractions of the notion of linear independence. They are one of the main objects studied in the current special year in the School of Mathematics. I will talk about a notion of scattering amplitudes for matroids. It is...

I will discuss dilaton gravity with a sine potential, where periodic shifts of the dilaton (that leave the potential invariant) are treated as a redundancy. Most things I will say hold true for generic periodic potentials, but the sine potential is...

This talk will discuss what's new with some of the most interesting looking cosmological tensions: the Hubble tension, the growth of structure tension (S8, growth rate, Lyman Alpha) and Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (Lithium and Deuterium). Some of these...

We analyze a model of qubits which we argue has an emergent quantum gravitational description similar to the fermionic Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model. The model we consider is known as the quantum $q$-spin model because it features $q$-local...