Physics

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...

I will discuss new universal bounds on the spectra of two-dimensional unitary, compact conformal field theories coming from the modular bootstrap. In the presence of a twist gap amongst the Virasoro primary operators (where twist is defined as the...

My talk will aim to be a friendly introduction for condensed matter friends, mathematicians, and QFT theorists alike --- I shall quickly review and warm up the use of higher symmetries and anomalies of gauge theories and condensed matter systems...

In many-body chaotic systems, the size of an operator generically grows in Heisenberg evolution, and is measured by out-of-time-ordered four-point functions. However, these only provide a coarse probe of the full underlying operator growth structure...

I will start by reviewing the three inequivalent topological twists of N = 4 SYM on arbitrary four-manifolds and briefly discuss the resulting topological QFTs. I will emphasise the role played by global anomalies of N = 4 in our story and the...

Charge transport near quantum critical points partly occur in phases with spontaneously broken symmetries. In an effective field theory approach, this transport can be described in a hydrodynamic theory with Goldstone modes encoding the broken...

I will describe a large ensemble of compactifications of type IIB string theory on Calabi-Yau threefold hypersurfaces, obtained by triangulating polytopes from the Kreuzer-Skarke list. We have developed methods to compute effective theories in the...

In this talk we revisit the holographic calculation of 1/2-BPS four-point functions from IIB supergravity compactified on $AdS_3\times S^3\times K3$. I will present evidence that the four-point functions exhibit a hidden 6d conformal symmetry. Using...

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...

Every CFT in dimensions greater than two contains an infinite set of Regge trajectories of local operators which, at large spin, asymptote to "double-twist" composites with vanishing anomalous dimension. In two dimensions, due to the existence of...