School of Natural Sciences

The cosmic history of galaxy formation is the history of star formation writ large.  Some of the most important processes affecting galaxy evolution involve coupling between stellar and gaseous components, since massive stars are the primary energy...

Despite the apparent complexity of galaxies, some of their most basic properties (mass M, binding energy E, angular momentum J, etc) obey simple power-law scaling relations. Such relations provide some of the clearest insights into galaxy formation...

Holographic tensor networks model AdS/CFT, but so far they have been limited by involving only systems that are very different from gravity. Unfortunately, we cannot straightforwardly discretize gravity to incorporate it, because that would break...

The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA detector network has observed over 70 gravitational-wave sources to date, including mergers between black holes, neutron stars, and mixed neutron star-black holes. Focusing on the black hole mergers, I will describe some recent...

In the original CPT theorem one is restricted to flat space and is unable to make converse statements. In this talk I will show how we can reformulate the CPT theorem using a symmetry argument and generalise it to beyond flat space. This in turn...

The Milky Way contains of order 10^8 stellar-mass black holes (BHs). Yet, fewer than 100 BH candidates are known, and only about 20 are dynamically confirmed. Our view of the BH population has been shaped almost entirely by observations of X-ray...

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...