IAS High Energy Theory Seminar

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

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 [???,?+?...

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...

  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...

We show that a naïve application of the quantum extremal surface (QES) prescription can lead to paradoxical results and must be corrected at leading order. The corrections arise when there is a second QES (with strictly larger generalized entropy at...

There are a few well-known ways for quantum mechanical, many-body systems to avoid coming to thermal equilibrium. For example, we know of two classes of systems -- integrable systems, and many-body localized systems -- for which conservation laws...

I will discuss properties of phases of matter in systems with a global U(1) symmetry and a (possibly discrete) translation symmetry. The low energy theory of such systems is strongly constrained by these symmetries. I will give a framework to...

I will motivate and discuss the notion of dispersive sum rules in conformal field theory. They are sum rules satisfied by the OPE data of a four-point function as a consequence of conformal dispersion relations. Physically, they are a detailed...

Abstract: I will demonstrate that holographic error correcting codes naturally give rise to conditional expectations acting on the local operator algebras in the boundary theory. I will use this to give simple derivations of some previously known...

In conformal field theory, in contrast to gapped theories, S-matrix is not well-defined. Similarly, various inclusive observables which make sense in a gapped theory, such as "energy squared" calorimeters, suffer from IR divergences in CFTs. Using...