I will start with some comments about the theoretical and experimental status of conformal invariance in critical phenomena, first proposed by A. Polyakov in 1970. I will then focus on a couple of experimentally significant models of statistical physics (ferromagnets in presence of strong dipolar forces, fluctuating…

I will discuss the obstacles I have experienced as a female, non-native English speaker, and a first-generation college student with an F-1 visa enrolled in a PhD program in the US. I will give some pieces of advice to both the students who have a similar background and to the supervisors who mentor these students. I will also discuss some…

I will discuss exoplanets as new targets to discover Dark Matter (DM). Throughout the Milky Way, DM can scatter, become captured, deposit annihilation energy, and increase the heat flow within exoplanets. I will show estimates for infrared telescope sensitivity to this scenario, finding actionable discovery or exclusion searches. Supporting…

"Superconductors come in many varieties: we typically classify them based on the symmetry of their superconducting gap, such as s, p, or d-wave. This classification, however, does not tell the entire story because the superconducting gap can also have topological structure. One route to topological superconductivity is to…

MAGIS-100 is a macroscopic ‘Quantum-Sensor’, based on a 100-meter light-pulse atom interferometer, being built at Fermilab by an international collaboration, in search of the “dark” sector of the universe (“dark” matter and energy) and “early-universe” gravitational wave background. The experiment can potentially search for new forces and test …

The technique of “Stochastic Cooling” of phase space of a particle beam, using microwave techniques in the GHz frequency range, has been employed historically in particle colliders, leading to ground-breaking discoveries. ‘Cooling’ increases the probability of interactions in colliding beams, thus enhancing the likelihood of observing rare…

In this talk, I will present a new systematic approach of constructing solvable lattice Hamiltonians for a large class of 2+1D topological orders, which are enriched by background Electromagnetic U(1) symmetry and feature non-trivial fractional Hall conductivity. This approach goes beyond the conventional fixed-point principle by considering…

 I will explain recent work with S. Mizera in which we give explicit evaluations of one-loop open string amplitudes at finite alpha’. Our method involves various deformations of the contour integral over the modular parameter. We directly verify that the one-loop string amplitude satisfies unitarity constraints. I…

In this talk I will focus on light dark matter particles, with a mass between 1 MeV and a few GeV. These particles can annihilate or decay into electron-positron pairs which can upscatter the low-energy fields in our Galaxy and produce X-ray emission. By using the X-ray data from XMM-Newton, Integral, Suzaku and NuStar, we derive strong…

While Laughlin identified the fractional quantum Hall state as a consequence of an “incompressible quantum fluid”, well-described by his model  wavefunction  which exhibits “flux attachment”, no fundamental explanation of the energetics driving “flux attachment” has emerged. A new picture reveals that  a…