Archive of IAS Physics Group Meetings

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...

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...

I will review the perturbative (genus) expansion of one-matrix integrals via the loop equations, and the streamlined version due to Eynard. I will review double-scaled matrix integrals and discuss a heuristic method for computing some...

Light scalar dark matter fields can exhibit several interesting aspects to their cosmological evolution. I will focus mostly on structure formation with ultralight axions and with the QCD axion. The standard scenario leads to a suppression of...

I will give a review of recent progress in studying 6D SYM and supergravity amplitudes. Based on the spinor-helicity formalism of Cheung and O'Connell, recent work has shown that superamplitudes in 6D have a simple and compact form, not unlike 4D...

I will go over the new proof of the quantum null energy condition (QNEC):https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.04683The proof uses tools and techniques from the modular theory. In particular, see Section 2.4 theorem B of Borchers notes:https://www.mat.univie...

Operators with non-integer spin have been considered in the literature in various forms and contexts, and have been suggested to control the Regge limit and the OPE of average null energy operators. I will discuss the idea of formally introducing...

I will discuss an approach to integrable models from a four-dimensional Chern-Simons-type gauge theory. For introduction please have a look at E. Witten arXiv:1611.00592 or K. Costello arXiv:1308.0370. It might be interesting to look into some...

I will introduce the notion of the Swampland, first defined in 0509212/hep-th. I will then discuss a number of Swampland Conjectures, including "No Global Symmetries" (1011.5120/hep-th, 1810.05337/hep-th), the "Weak Gravity Conjecture" (0601001/hep...