IAS High Energy Theory Seminar

I discuss physical motivations from black hole physics and holography for expecting finite quantum entanglement entropy in quantum gravity. I describe recent and earlier results in defining such a notion in perturbative string theory by a stringy...

The moduli space of curves, M_g, is an object of pivotal interest in mathematics and theoretical physics. Even though it has been studied with tremendous effort, little is known about its topology. For instance, the total dimension of the cohomology...

The spectrum of single-trace operators of order-one dimension, of holographic CFTs at strong coupling and large N, can be mapped to the spectrum of Kaluza-Klein (KK) excitations over the dual AdS supergravity solutions. Computing these KK spectra is...

The density of states of a unitary conformal field theory is known to have a universal behavior at high energy. In two dimensions, this behavior is described by the Cardy formula. If the theory has symmetry, it is interesting to understand the...

We add non-linear and state-dependent terms to the Hamiltonian of quantum field theory. The resulting low-energy theory, non-linear quantum mechanics, is causal, preserves probability and permits a consistent description of the process of...

I will showcase the computation of the next-to-leading order scattering waveform in classical gravity using amplitude techniques. I will first give an overview of how to compute generic classical observables in gravity using scattering amplitude...

I will explain my reasons for thinking that the double-scaled SYK theory at infinite temperature is a theory of de Sitter space.

The key word in the title is “IN”. Unlike AdS where observers can be thought of as living on the boundary of space, or even in a laboratory beyond the boundary, in dS the observer is part of the system; he or she lives “in” the de Sitter spacetime...

The entropy of supersymmetric black holes in string theory compactifications can be related to that of a D- or M-brane system, which in many cases can be further reduced to a two-dimensional conformal field theory (CFT). For black holes in M-theory...

"Saturons" are macroscopic objects that exhibit maximal micristate degeneracy within the validity of a given quantum  field theoretic description.  Due to this feature, saturons and black holes belong to the same universality class with common key...