IAS High Energy Theory Seminar

We will discuss excitations with large spin and/or large particle number. For conformal theories this corresponds to investigating particular trajectories of heavy operators. 

We find trajectories with large approximate degeneracy and show that they...

I will give a lightning review of results on this subject from 1988-1998 and then describe more recent developments, mostly current work in progress.  First, I will describe topological twisting of Lagrangian N=2 d=4 field theories in terms of the...

Conformal Field Theory (CFT) represents a class of quantum field theories that has profound applications across various physics domains, from critical phenomena in statistical mechanics to quantum matter, quantum gravity, and string theory. In this...

Post-inflationary QCD axion is an attractive solution to the Strong CP problem because of the possibility to uniquely predict the axion mass if axion makes up all of dark matter. On the other hand, QCD axion models often suffer from the so-called...

String stars, or Horowitz-Polchinski solutions, are string theory saddles with normalizable condensates of thermal-winding strings. In the past, string stars were offered as a possible description of stringy (Euclidean) black holes in asymptotically...

M- and F-theory compactifications with ADE singularities give rise to non-abelian ADE gauge symmetries. The physical explanation for this phenomenon involves M2-branes wrapped on vanishing cycles. We consider an alternative approach which relies on...

Instantons are an important source of nonperturbative effects in quantum field theories, but their role in asymptotically free theories has not been well understood. In this talk, we will present a new approach to instanton analysis in the context...

I will talk about the invariants of topologically ordered states of quantum lattice systems that generalize Berry classes and can be defined for any gapped state in any dimension. The equivariant version of such invariants unifies and generalizes...

Kinematically, massless particles in Lorentz-invariant theories are classified by a dimensionful "spin scale"ρ  (2nd Casimir invariant) that characterizes helicity states' mixing under little group transformations.  However, dynamics for particles...

We discuss shockwave geometries and the connections to aspects of flat space holography. We first show how the ’t Hooft commutation relations of shockwave operators are equivalent to the commutation relation between soft and Goldstone modes familiar...