I will discuss the small speed of light expansion of general relativity, utilizing the modern perspective on non-Lorentzian geometry. The leading order in the expansion leads to an action that corresponds to the electric Carroll limit of general relativity, of which I will highlight some interesting properties. The next-to-leading order will also be obtained, which exhibits a particular subsector that correspond to the magnetic Carroll limit, which features a solution that describes the Carroll limit...

This talk will focus on the behavior of colloidal crystals, and will describe both the nucleation and growth of crystals and their melting. The nucleation and growth of colloidal crystals is experimentally observed to be much faster than expected theoretically or through simulation. The discrepancy can be as much as 10150! I will describe some new experiments that suggest a possible reason for this. I will also describe the melting of colloidal crystals formed with...

Impacts of asteroid and comets constitute major geologic processes shaping the surfaces and evolution of planetary bodies. Impacts produce deep transient cavities, with excavation to deep crustal levels, fragmentation, and removal of large rock volumes. Formation of complex craters involves high pressures and temperatures resulting in intense deformation, fracturing and melting. Here, we analyze the crater-forming impacts and their effects on the Earth´s climate, environment and life-support systems, in relation to the Cretaceous/Paleogene (K/Pg) boundary....

Large scale structure contains vastly more Fourier modes than the CMB, and is therefore a promising arena for studying the early universe.  One obstacle to using these modes is the non-linearity of structure formation. The amount of weakly coupled information available is therefore very sensitive to scale at which non-linear effects become important and simulations become necessary.  Using effective field theory techniques, I will present evidence that the perturbative description of dark matter is much...

Negativity in a quasi-probability representation is typically interpreted as an indication of nonclassical behavior.  However, this does not preclude bases that are non-negative from having interesting applications---the single-qubit stabilizer states have non-negative Wigner functions and yet play a fundamental role in many quantum information tasks. We determine what other sets of quantum states and measurements of a qubit can be non-negative in a quasiprobability representation, and identify nontrivial groups of unitary transformations that permute such...

We study the boundary conditions in the topologically twisted Chern-Simons matter theories with the Lie 3-algebraic structure. We find that the supersymmetric boundary conditions and the gauge invariant boundary conditions can be unified as the complexified gauge invariant boundary conditions which lead to the supergroup WZW models. We examine the BPS indices of the supergroup WZW models which may describe certain junctions of M2-branes and M5-branes by identifying the vacuum configurations of the brane system...

Topological phases of matter serve as one of the most striking examples of the richness and novelty of quantum systems with many degrees of freedom.  In contrast to conventional matter, they are characterized by both non-local properties and non-classical notions such as entanglement.  I will discuss two broad categories of topological phases, distinguished by whether or not they possess fractionalized “anyon” excitations that are neither bosons nor fermions.  I will demonstrate that entanglement not only...

We consider the problem of certifying entanglement and nonlocality in one-dimensional translation-invariant (TI) infinite systems when just averaged near-neighbor correlators are available. Exploiting the triviality of the marginal problem for 1D TI distributions, we arrive at a practical characterization of the near-neighbor density matrices of multi-separable TI quantum states. This allows us, e.g., to identify a family of separable two-qubit states which only admit entangled TI extensions. For nonlocality detection, we show that, when viewed...

The Kochen-Specker (KS) theorem can gives rise to logical paradoxes under pre- and post-selection in which the contextual behavior is confined to specific observables of a system. Weak measurements allow direct experimental observation of the nonclassical behavior of these specific observables. This presents an experimental advantage over other tests of KS inequalities which rule out a particular class of counterfactual noncontextual hidden variable models, but can never specify where the contradiction occurs, nor make any...

We investigate the theoretical implications of scale without conformal invariance in quantum field theory. We argue that the RG flows of such theories correspond to recurrent behaviors, i.e. limit cycles or ergodicity. We discuss the implications for the a-theorem and show how dilatation generators do generate dilatations. Finally, we discuss possible well-behaved non-conformal scale-invariant examples.

We present a general, analytic recipe to compute the entanglement that is generated between arbitrary, discrete modes of bosonic quantum fields by Bogoliubov transformations. Our setup allows the complete characterization of the quantum correlations in all Gaussian field states. Additionally, it holds for all Bogoliubov transformations. These are commonly applied in quantum optics for the description of squeezing operations, relate the modedecompositions of observers in different regions of curved spacetimes, and describe observers moving along...

In the last few decades, there has been a marked rise in the diversity of compounds studied with frustrated networks of spins. This was clearly not the case in the early days of this field, where only a handful of “model” systems were being studied (ie. in two dimensions, the triangular or kagome lattices, and in three dimensions, the pyrochlore lattice).  Solid state chemists have played a major role in not only the identification of new geometrically...

Spin liquid phases in frustrated magnets may arise in a variety of forms. Here we discuss the possibility of topological insulators of spinons or the fractionalized excitations in spin liquids. These phases should be characterized by "both" of the two popular and different definitions of topological orders, namely the long-range entanglement and the symmetry-protected topological order. We show an explicit construction of such a state in frustrated magnets on the pyrochlore lattice and discuss novel...

We report on the ab-plane optical properties of the magnetic field inducednormal state of underdoped La1.94Sr0.06CuO4  (Tc=5.5 K), the first such study. We apply strong magnetic fields (4 T and 16 T) along the c-axis. We find that a 4 T field is strong enough to destroy the superconducting condensate.  However at higher fields we observed a gap-like depression in the optical conductivity at low frequency along with parallel growth of a broad absorption peak...

We used time-of-flight inelastic neutron scattering to measure the excitation spectra from field-polarized states of exotic frustrated magnets. A knowledge of these spin-wave excitations in various directions in reciprocal space allows a robust determination of exchange parameters in suitable model Hamiltonians.  We have taken this approach with two pyrochlores, Er2Ti2O7 and Yb2Ti2O7, whose magnetic properties have until this point been somewhat puzzling.  The model we use is an effective spin-1/2 exchange Hamiltonian that incorporates the full...

Quantum information methods have been recently used for studying the properties of ground state entanglement in several many body and field theory systems. We will discuss a thought experiment wherein entanglement can be extracted from the vacuum of a relativistic field theory into a pair of arbitrarily spatially separated atoms. In order to simulate the detection process, we will consider the ground state of a linear chain of cooled trapped ions, and discuss a scheme...

Given the difficulty of studying time-dependent processes in string theory, closed string tachyon condensation problems are often modelled by the process of renormalization group flow on the world-sheet. But what is the quantitative relation between these two processes? In this talk I will give a partial answer to this question, and discuss what it teaches us about closed string tachyon dynamics.