Video Lectures

 We review some recent progress towards  understanding   holographic duality for quantum gravity in asymptotically flat four-dimensional spacetimes. 

Earth-based radar observations in 2006–2019 enable the first measurement of the spin precession rate and moment of inertia of Venus. The observations also show that the spin period of the solid planet changes by tens of minutes. The length-of-day...

It’s been a fantastic decade for black hole studies, highlighted by the 2017 and 2020 Nobel Prizes in Physics. Multiple Galactic Center research groups, the Event Horizon Telescope, and LIGO/Virgo continue to bring rapid-fire new observations to...

We consider the universality of existence and saturation of asymptotic bounds in various quantities in 2D CFT. In particular, we focus on previously derived upper and lower bounds on the number of operators in a window of scaling dimensions [Δ−δ,Δ+δ...

I will present the first results of the survey of all white dwarfs (WD) that were observed in the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) using the Visible Integral-field Replicable Unit Spectrograph (VIRUS). The final outcome will be...

In this talk, I will give the 2020 summary of the 6.5 meter James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the near--mid-IR sequel to both Hubble and Spitzer. All hardware has been built, and is in the final stages of testing for its launch scheduled in October...

A fascinating feature of some gapped systems is topological order, where the system flows to a nontrivial TQFT in the infrared. The gap is often essential to the description of these phases, so it is interesting to ask what happens to them when the...

A dark matter candidate lighter than about 30 eV exhibits wave behavior in a typical galactic environment. Examples include the QCD axion as well as other axion-like-particles. We review the particle physics motivations, and discuss experimental and...

One of the key objectives of modern astrophysics is to understand the formation and evolution galaxies. In this regard, the Milky Way is a critical testing ground for our theories of galaxy formation. However, dissecting the assembly history of the...

  Spacetime wormholes have played an important role in recent progress in black hole physics. However, in the context of AdS/CFT, these wormholes lead to a basic puzzle: the "factorization problem", introduced by Maldacena and Maoz. In this talk we...