IAS High Energy Theory Seminar

In this talk, I will discuss Cosmohedra. These are geometric objects which encode the vacuum wavefunction for theories with colored scalars with cubic interactions. I will start by introducing the vacuum wavefunction, both in Minkowski and de Sitter...

The $\epsilon$-expansion is a widely used technique to study aspects of renormalization group flows and critical phenomena. In this talk, I will discuss  recent developments of the $\epsilon$-expansion in the study of boundary and defect...

In a spacetime with asymptotically anti-de-Sitter boundaries, localized bulk events produce characteristic signals at boundary locations that are lightlike from the event. I will describe (thought) experiments that use boundary wavepackets to...

I will explore one of the most profound open question in particle physics, focusing on some exciting directions of my ongoing research activity: the strong CP problem. I will begin with an overview of the strong CP problem, highlighting proposed...

In large N theories with a gravity dual, generic heavy operators should be dual to black holes in the bulk. The microscopic details of such operators should then be irrelevant in the low energy theory. We look for such universality in the strong...

I will discuss the path integral of pure 3D gravity on a finite region of spacetime, with boundary conditions that fix dihedral angles or geodesic lengths. This amplitude calculates corrections to the Gaussian statistics of OPE coefficients in the...

I will explain how the irreversibility of the renormalization group together with anomalies, including anomalies in the space of coupling constants, can be used to constrain the IR phases of defects in familiar quantum field theories. As an example...

Drawing inspiration from AdS/CFT holography, I will discuss the idea that a static patch in de Sitter space admits a fundamental description based upon standard quantum mechanics. Taking a bottom-up perspective, I compute correlation functions of...

Symmetries play a crucial role in both quantum field theory and quantum many-body systems on the lattice. One key topological feature that a global symmetry can have is a "('t Hooft) anomaly". But how exactly should an anomaly be defined? In this...

Black hole perturbation theory captures a few important effects in the dynamics of binary mergers, such as tidal deformations and the decay of ringdown modes. It also describes the physics of the photon ring. However, extracting qualitative results...