Video Lectures

Kinematically, massless particles in Lorentz-invariant theories are classified by a dimensionful "spin scale"ρ  (2nd Casimir invariant) that characterizes helicity states' mixing under little group transformations.  However, dynamics for particles...

Interpreting observations of extreme astrophysical phenomena requires a detailed understanding of particle acceleration in astrophysical environments. These accelerated particles, known as cosmic rays, approximately follow a power-law distribution...

We discuss shockwave geometries and the connections to aspects of flat space holography. We first show how the ’t Hooft commutation relations of shockwave operators are equivalent to the commutation relation between soft and Goldstone modes familiar...

Exoplanet systems are expected to evolve with time as they age. In most cases though, the dynamical evolution of exoplanet systems over billion-year timescales are hard to observe. I'll describe how Galactic kinematics can provide accurate and...

I discuss physical motivations from black hole physics and holography for expecting finite quantum entanglement entropy in quantum gravity. I describe recent and earlier results in defining such a notion in perturbative string theory by a stringy...

The moduli space of curves, M_g, is an object of pivotal interest in mathematics and theoretical physics. Even though it has been studied with tremendous effort, little is known about its topology. For instance, the total dimension of the cohomology...

Gravitational waves have uncovered a treasure trove of nearly 90 merging black holes and neutron stars, each with its own unique story to tell. In this talk, our focus centers on black hole spins, seeking to decipher the secrets hidden within...

The spectrum of single-trace operators of order-one dimension, of holographic CFTs at strong coupling and large N, can be mapped to the spectrum of Kaluza-Klein (KK) excitations over the dual AdS supergravity solutions. Computing these KK spectra is...

In the inner Milky Way stars trek together in a bar-shaped, rotating overdensity: the central bar, which dominates the inner disc out half-way to the Sun. The rotation velocity/pattern speed of this bar has been intensely debated. The best insight...

The density of states of a unitary conformal field theory is known to have a universal behavior at high energy. In two dimensions, this behavior is described by the Cardy formula. If the theory has symmetry, it is interesting to understand the...