Week 06.02.2022 – 12.02.2022

Few notions within the realm of mathematical physics succeed in capturing the imagination and inspiring awe as well as that of a black hole. First encountered in the Schwarzschild solution, discovered a few months after the presentation of the Field Equations of General Relativity at the Prussian Academy of Sciences, the black hole as a mathematical phenomenon accompanies and prominently features within the history of General Relativity since its inception. In this talk we will lay out a brief history of the question of dynamical black hole formation in General Relativity and discuss a result, in collaboration with Xinliang An, on a scale-critical trapped surface formation criterion for the Einstein-Maxwell system. Email m.godazgar@qmul.ac.uk for zoom link.

Processes of particle production during inflation can increase the amplitude of the scalar metric perturbations. We show that such a mechanism can naturally arise in supergravity models where an axion-like field drives large field inflation. In this class of models one generally expects instanton-like corrections to the superpotential. We show, by deriving the equations of motion in models of supergravity with a stabilizer, that such corrections generate an interaction between the inflaton and its superpartner. This inflaton-inflatino interaction term is rapidly oscillating, and can lead to copious production of inflatinos during inflation, filling the Fermi sphere up to momenta much larger than the Hubble parameter. In their turn, those fermions source inflaton fluctuations, increasing their amplitude, and effectively lowering the tensor-to-scalar ratio for the model. This allows, in particular, to bring the model where the inflaton potential is quadratic (plus negligibly small instanton corrections) to agree with all existing observations.

I will introduce a class of non-invertible topological defects in (3+1)d gauge theories whose fusion rules are the higher-dimensional analogs of those of the Kramers-Wannier defect in the (1+1)d critical Ising model. As in the lower-dimensional case, the presence of such non-invertible defects implies self-duality under a particular gauging of the discrete (higher-form) symmetries. I will illustrate this by means of the example of SO(3) Yang-Mills (YM) at θ=π, as well as SU(2) N=4 SYM at τ=i.

I will argue that Double Field Theory (DFT) can describe some, but not all, alpha'-corrections to the tree-level string effective action. In particular, I will discuss how the first and second alpha'-corrections to the bosonic and heterotic string can be derived from DFT.

The application of random matrix techniques in QCD and non-Abelian gauge theories in general has a long history e.g. in counting Feynman diagrams, going back to 't Hooft and others. In this talk I will focus on a different aspect that relates the two in the low energy spectrum of the QCD Dirac operator, as initiated by Shuryak and Verbaarschot. First, I will explain what is the approximation studied here where spectral statistics of random matrices apply, and where for example the technique of orthogonal polynomials can be useful in comparing to QCD lattice data. It is given by a particular finite volume low energy limit, the epsilon regime of chiral perturbation theory of Gasser and Leutwyler. I will mention how QCD parameters like quark masses, zero-modes, finite lattice spacing or chemical potential can be incorporated into the random matrix ensemble. In the last part I will discuss some recent work with my former student Tim Wurfel on the inclusion of finite temperature, that leads out of the standard classes of random matrices, but still remains analytically tractable. This talk is mainly based on the review arXiv:1603.06011 and the paper with Tim arXiv:2110.03617; part of the London TQFT Journal Club; it will be possible to follow this talk online (please register at https://london-tqft.vercel.app)

In this talk, I will discuss how to compute the spectral curve of "segmented strings" in AdS_3. The motion of a string in this target space is integrable and the worldsheet theory can be discretized while preserving integrability. The corresponding embeddings are segmented strings, which generalize piecewise linear strings in flat space. I will present several examples. Next, I will introduce "brane tilings", which are doubly-periodic planar bipartite graphs. I will show that the motion of a closed segmented string can be embedded into the mutation dynamics of a certain brane tiling. This will enable us to compute the spectral curve by taking the determinant of the dressed adjacency matrix of the tiling. ----------- Part of the London Integrability Journal Club. Please register at integrability-london.weebly.com if you are a new participant. The link will be emailed on Tuesday.

I will describe the space of effective field theories consistent with local, unitary, and analytic UV completions, which was termed the EFThedron. Recently the EFThedron was generalized to a non-projective geometry, which can be used to implement new constraints on spectral functions. These include the unitarity bound, which leads to analytic bounds on single Wilson coefficients (instead of bounds only on ratios), or the low spin dominance condition, which drastically reduces the landscape of allowed theories. [for zoom link please contact h(dot)jiang(at)qmul(dot)ac(dot)uk]