How does learning occur? Neural networks learn via optimization, where a loss function is minimized by a computer to achieve the desired result. But physical networks such as mechanical spring networks or flow networks have no central processor so they cannot minimize such a loss function. An alternative is to encode local rules into those…

We study collisions of localized shockwaves behind the horizon of the eternal AdS black hole. We give a holographic boundary description in terms of the overlap of two growing perturbations in a shared quantum circuit. Due to a competition between different physical effects, the circuit analysis shows dependence on the transverse locations and…

The first quantum revolution brought us the great technological advances of the 20th century—the transistor, the laser, the atomic clock and GPS, the global positioning system.  We now realize that this 20th century hardware does not take full advantage of the power of quantum machines. A second quantum…

Probing the Yukawa couplings is paramount to understand the role played by the Higgs boson in the Standard Model. Ten years after the discovery of the Higgs boson, all the Yukawa couplings to the third generation of fermions have been measured. More recently the CMS and ATLAS collaborations claimed the evidence of the…

Abstract:

The kagome lattice is a tiling of two-dimensional space comprised of corner-sharing triangles, having the same point symmetries as the honeycomb lattice (graphene) but a richer electronic structure. Recent theoretical developments suggest that the combination of magnetism, spin-orbit coupling, and geometric frustration in…

We study Chern-Simons theories at large N with either bosonic or fermionic matter in the fundamental representation. The most fundamental operators in these theories are mesonic line operators, the simplest example being Wilson lines ending on fundamentals. We classify the conformal line operators along an arbitrary smooth path as well as the…

The new field of stochastic thermodynamics allows us to analyze the thermodynamic behavior of dynamic systems arbitrarily far from thermal equilibrium, and has produced many powerful theorems concerning phenomena completely absent in traditional statistical physics. However, to date stochastic thermodynamics has (mostly) been applied to systems…

This year, NASA is beginning its search for a Probe-class ($1B) mission to fly in ~2032. This once-per-decade opportunity was endorsed by astro2020 as a way to achieve some of the science promised by the more complex and expensive far-infrared and X-ray missions that were prepared for the decadal survey. SALTUS, latin for leap, is a far…

The study of hyperuniform states of matter is an emerging multidisciplinary field, influencing and linking developments across the physical sciences, mathematics and biology. The hyperuniformity concept generalizes the traditional notion of long-range order to include not only all crystals and quasicrystals,…

Certain objects of conformal field theory, for example partition functions on the rectangle and the torus, and one-point functions on the torus, are either invariant or transform simply under the modular group, properties which should be preserved under the TTbar deformation. The formulation and proof of this statement in fact extends to more…

Mechanical stability and shape changes of cells are determined by the dynamic interplay of four distinct cytoskeletal networks, made of actin filaments, microtubules, intermediate filaments and septins. These four filamentous systems contribute different structural and dynamical properties, enabling specific cellular…

We discuss emergent type III1 von Neumann algebraic structures in the large N limit of certain class of quantum field theories. We show that this is important for understanding various aspects of bulk physics in the AdS/CFT duality, including explicit boundary constructions of Kruskal-like time evolution in an eternal black hole, boundary…

Liquid-liquid phase separation of cell membranes exemplifies a biological system leveraging a physical concept to achieve a chemical end. Here, we show that yeast actively tune the transition temperature of their vacuole membranes to be close to the yeast's growth temperature, which implies that the membrane's proximity to the miscibility…