Graphene has recently attracted considerable interest because the fourfold spin and valley degeneracy of its charge carriers enables the formation of a rich variety of correlated states at high magnetic field. In this talk, I will discuss electronic compressibility measurements of suspended graphene in the quantum Hall regime. Our measurements…

The cuprate high temperature superconductors constitute one of the most difficult problems in condensed matter physics and a detailed experimental phenomenology is a crucial starting point for microscopic understanding. Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) measures electronic structure in momentum-space and is a powerful tool for…

"Searching for chiral symmetry restoration in relativistic heavy-ion collision with vector mesons" Abstract: Hadronic resonances can play a pivotal role in providing experimental evidence for partial chiral symmetry restoration in the deconfined quark-gluon phase produced in high energy nucleus-nucleus collisions at RHIC and LHC. Their short…

I will discuss an old argument suggesting that thermodynamics of vacuum fluctuations implies that spacetime causal structure is dynamical and governedby Einstein's equation. Various probes of the consistency of this reasoning and implications for the nature of horizon entropy will be considered.

The role of molecular spectroscopy in the broader interests of physics has evolved over the years. It was traditionally the study of molecular structure and its underlying quantum mechanics. Later, it led to various applications including the first “atomic clock” that was actually based on molecular vibrations and to the observation of star light…

I will explain how the S^5 partition function of 5d superconformal field theories with gravity duals may be computed in the large N limit. This involves applying the techniques of localization to non-renormalizable 5d Yang-Mills theories obtained by deformation of these SCFTs by a relevant operator. The result matches exactly the leading…

Based on the work of Durhuus-Jonsson and Benedetti-Ziegler, we revisit the question of the number of triangulations of the 3-ball. We introduce a notion of nucleus (a triangulation of the 3-ball without internal nodes, and with each internal face having at most 1 external edge). We show that every triangulation can be built from trees of…

I argue that the following three widely believed statements cannot all be true: (i) Hawking radiation is in a pure state, (ii) the information carried by the radiation is emitted from the region near the horizon, with low energy effective field theory valid beyond some microscopic distance from the horizon, and (iii) the infalling observer…

Abstract: Recent advances in probing and controlling ultracold atomic gases have allowed access to rich physics from the realm of condensed matter. In the first part of this talk, I will describe quantum gas microscopy, a new tool for imaging and manipulating strongly interacting quantum gases containing thousands of atoms at the single atom…

Abstract: When a band of noninteracting electrons has a nontrivial Chern number, it is called a Chern band. When such a band is fully filled, the dimensionless Hall conductance is the Chern number. There is considerable numerical evidence that in the presence of suitable interactions, when a Chern band is fractionally filled, the electrons form…

“Epistasis and adaptation in yeast” Populations adapt when they encounter new environments, but our ability to predict the course and rate of adaptation are quite limited. A major complication is that we do not know how one mutation might influence the fitness effects of other mutations. In other words, we do not know the structure of…

We discuss how locality in AdS duals to Conformal Field Theories emerge vis-a-vis bulk Effective Field Theory descriptions with a high-scale cut-off, and the emergence of a weakly-coupled Eikonal limit for high-spin CFT operators. First, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for a CFT to have a description in terms of a local EFT in AdS…

The plant kingdom is rich with examples of tissues, organs and entire organisms that uniquely showcase elegant mathematical and physical principles. These principles frequently reflect the interplay between functional necessity and developmental constraints. We discuss two examples that showcase how plants utilize intricate topological and…

The collective behavior of an ensemble of strongly interacting fermions is central to many physical systems including liquid 3He, high-Tc superconductors, quark-gluon plasma, neutron stars, and ultracold Fermi gases. However, theoretical understanding of strongly interacting fermions is challenging due to the many-body nature of the problem and…

The snail-shaped mammalian cochlea houses a narrow strip of sensory tissue that separates compartments of salty water. Sound stimulation launches a mechanical traveling wave down the cochlea that peaks in a tonotopic manner: high/low frequencies peak in the cochlear base/apex. Sensory hair cells respond to the motion with intracellular current…