Week 28.03.2022 – 03.04.2022

With a view towards constructing Calabi Yau manifolds, we present some rudiments of the intersection between algebraic, differential and arithmetic geometry. Throughout we will take the opposite of the Bourbaki approach and work through explicit examples, rather than to emphasise on the theory.

ABS: TBC NB: The colloquium will follow naturally on from the LonTI lecture and there will be refreshments. BIO: Professor Peter Cochrane, DSc, OBE, is Professor of Sentient Systems at the University of Suffolk, and visiting Professor to The University of Hertfordshire, Salford, and Nottingham Trent University has received numerous awards including the IEEE Millennium Medal, Martlesham Medal, Prince Philip Medal, Queens Award for Export and Technology and an OBE by The Queen in 1999. He retired from BT as CTO in 2000 to form his own consultancy company. This saw the founding of eBookers, Shazam Entertainment, and a raft of smaller start ups. Peter has also seen assignments with UK, Singapore and Qatar government departments; HP, Motorola, 3M, Dupont, Ford, Sun, Apple, Cisco, Rolls Royce, BMW, Jersey Tel, Chorus, FaceBook, et al.

Please email m.godazgar@qmul.ac.uk for zoom link. Abstract: To date, gravitational waves from tens of merging stellar-mass black holes have been observed. These observations provide us with a unique opportunity to probe the fundamental properties of astrophysical black holes. The precise measurement of the masses and spins of black holes is particularly crucial to determine the evolutionary pathways of these binaries. This requires, however, highly accurate theoretical models of the emitted gravitational-wave signal. The signal complexity grows with the number of degrees of freedom and the accurate modelling general-relativistic spin-induced precession has proven to be challenging. In this talk, I will first discuss the current approaches to modelling waveforms from precessing black hole binaries. I will then demonstrate the limitations and how they translate into systematic measurement uncertainties.

Gravitational Waves (GWs) have become one of the most powerful tools to explore our universe from its early epoch until nowadays, thanks to their freely propagating nature. After the GW detections from resolved sources by the LIGO/Virgo collaboration the next target of present and future ground and space-based interferometers is the detection of the stochastic background of GW (SGWB), both astrophysical or cosmological. General Relativity provides us with an extremely powerful and for free tool to extract astrophysical and cosmological information from the SGWB: the cross-correlation with other cosmological tracers, since their anisotropies share a common origin and the same perturbed geodesics. In this talk I will present some recent results about the study of the cross-correlation of the cosmological and astrophysical SGWBs with Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies, showing that future GW detectors, such as LISA or BBO, have the ability to measure such cross-correlation signals. I will also present a new tool in this context which can be used to reconstruct the expected SGWB maps starting from high resolution real Planck CMB maps.

The classical singularity theorems predict the existence of singularities, defined using incomplete geodesics, under a set of general assumptions. One of those assumptions, namely the energy condition, is always violated by quantum fields and thus the realm of semiclassical gravity is outside the scope of these theorems. However, quantum fields do obey weaker conditions which can also be used to predict singularities. In this talk, I will present derivations of such semiclassical singularity theorems both in the timelike and the null case and discuss the challenges and open questions for each case.

We numerically study an anyon chain based on the Haagerup fusion category, and find evidence that it leads in the long-distance limit to a conformal field theory whose central charge is ~2; it will be possible to follow this talk online (please register at https://london-tqft.co.uk)

Ensemble averaging in quantum field theory is a well-defined procedure which is also of much recent interest in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence. In this talk we present a stringy realization of quantum field theory ensembles in D \leq 4 spacetime dimensions. This provides a UV completion of a recent proposal of Marolf and Maxfield that there is a high-dimensional Hilbert space for baby universes, but one that is compatible with the proposed Swampland constraints of McNamara and Vafa. We identify two ways in which our construction breaks down, one of which is sensitive to short distance effects, and one which is an entropic effect for objects with a large number of microstates. The construction thus provides an explicit set of counterexamples to the claim that holography can be fully decoupled from top down considerations. [for zoom link please contact h(dot)jiang(at)qmul(dot)ac(dot)uk]