Pure 3d gravity in AdS has only boundary degrees of freedom. I will show that these interact nontrivially if spacetime is restricted to a finite size. Their dynamics can be obtained equivalently by TTbar deforming the infinite volume theory. We can canonically quantize the gravitational side and, after a field redefinition, find a simple…

Measurement of natural systems typically involves perturbation and interpretation. In this talk, I will discuss the implications of measurement in the context of RNA in gene expression in human cells. I will focus on measurements of RNA biology using high-throughput sequencing, which are powerful for their scale but also involve perturbations…

D-instanton induced S-matrix in type 0B string theory in two dimensions suffers from infrared divergences. This can be traced to the fact that these processes produce low energy rolling tachyon states that cannot be regarded as linear combination of finite number of closed string states. We compute semi-inclusive cross sections in this theory…

QCD axions and Dark Matter Radio

The QCD axion, originally posed a solution to the strong CP problem, is among the most compelling candidates in the hunt for dark matter. The last decade has seen the emergence of several new ideas to search for axion dark matter. In this talk, I overview the landscape of…

In this talk, we will consider line defects (one-dimensional defects) in CFTs. Such systems are of relevance to various physical systems, with applications ranging from condensed matter physics to conformal gauge theories. I will review some general properties of line defects in CFTs, especially in the context of RG flows on line defects, where…

Abstract: In holographic duality an eternal AdS black hole is described by two copies of the boundary CFT in the thermal field double state. We provide explicit constructions in the boundary theory of infalling time evolutions which can take bulk observers behind the horizon. The constructions…

Recently, the LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA scientific collaboration reported the detection of nearly 80 gravitational wave sources, with the majority of them being binary black holes. The increased number of binary black hole observations allow for a more detailed investigation of their mass, spin and redshift distributions. I will discuss these…

In the context of theories with a first order phase transition, we propose a general covariant description of coexisting phases separated by domain walls using an additional order parameter-like degree of freedom. In the case of a holographic dual of confining and de-confining phases, the resulting model extends hydrodynamics and…

 A high energy muon collider is a unique machine that breaks the traditional energy/precision dichotomy. It provides both an unprecedented reach in energy with a compact ring and a clean environment that allows precise measurements. I will provide an overview of the powerful physics potential of a multi-TeV muon collider, starting from its…

The Higgs boson was discovered in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the world’s most powerful particle collider, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland. This particle plays a unique role in fundamental physics. It gives all of the known elementary particles, including itself, their masses. While we now have a strong…

Topologists can differentiate between bagels and pretzels by simply counting holes in each bread. The number of holes, formally described by the Euler characteristic, is a topological invariant insensitive to smooth deformation of the shape and size of an object. In condensed matter physics, we study an analogue of pastry, the Fermi sea. Nature…

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