School of Natural Sciences

The connection between 3d pure gravity and Chern-Simons theory has been proposed and studied for decades. In this talk, I will give a brief review of the works 2304.13650 and 2401.13900 with Scott Collier and Lorenz Eberhardt, where we sharpen this...

I will describe the one-loop partition function for strings propagating on AdS3 geometries with NS-NS flux (for generic values of AdS radius in string units). The essential ingredients that go into this analysis have been known for a while. The goal...

Star-shredding supermassive black holes (Tidal Disruption Events, TDEs) are potential emitters of high energy hadrons and neutrinos. Several TDEs have been observed as coincident with neutrino events detected at the IceCube neutrino observatory. I...

I will describe a double scaled matrix and tensor integral whose Feynman diagrams can be organized in a 3d topological expansion which agrees term by term with partition functions of 3d gravity. The integral is taken over CFT2 data, and the limiting...

This will be an informal presentation / discussion of the basics of holographic theories that live on Cauchy slices (arXiv:2204.00591), which can be constructed by the TTbar deformation.  Please feel free to bring in questions and I will try to...

Recent horizon-scale images of Messier 87* and Sagittarius A* have been used to demonstrate that their spacetimes are well-described by the Kerr metric. The latter is a solution to the vacuum Einstein equations of general relativity, and is used to...

In this talk, I will review recent progress in understanding the complex multi-scale plasma physics of neutron star magnetospheres through the lens of first-principles particle-in-cell simulations. I will highlight pair production discharges near...

The TTbar deformation is a holographic theory describing holography a finite distance in the bulk.   If this theory can be UV completed, it could be a model of nonperturbative bulk quantum gravity.  However, it seems to be a non-unitary theory, as...

Many modern techniques to analyze global planetary signals, from satellite gravity and the geoid, to magnetic fields, to the making of seismological models, heavily rely on a global function basis - the spherical harmonics. When the available data...

We will discuss excitations with large spin and/or large particle number. For conformal theories this corresponds to investigating particular trajectories of heavy operators. 

We find trajectories with large approximate degeneracy and show that they...