Week 30.10.2023 – 05.11.2023

In this talk I will introduce the double copy construction that allows us to write gravitational scattering amplitudes as the "square" of gauge theory ones. I will show how the standard construction can be generalized to include massive mediators and how this relationship can also be observed for classical solutions in coordinate space as well as for cohomology class representatives in twistor space. Throughout the talk I will focus on the example of Topologically Massive Theories.

A ’t Hooft loop is a typical disorder operator defined in any gauge theory that can be studied by a combination of holography, localization and integrability. After reviewing the quantum mechanics magnetic monopoles, I will describe how integrability and Bethe ansatz can help to study ’t Hooft loops in the N=4 super-Yang-Mills theory.

I will argue that combining old ideas such as dualities and exact results in SUSY QFTs supplemented with recent techniques such as SPT phases and generalised anomalies can shed light on strong coupling dynamics of non-SUSY theories. I will in particular show that non-SUSY gauge theories, which are related to SUSY SCFTs by RG in 5d exhibit phase transitions in the UV which are candidates for non-SUSY fixed points.

String theory has far surpassed expectations in its ability to shed light on many areas of theoretical and mathematical physics. However, partly due to the immense size of the solution space, it is yet to be determined if our universe lives somewhere in the string landscape. In this talk, I will present how methods from computer science (genetic algorithms and reinforcement learning) can shed some light on these questions by exploring promising regions of the string landscape. Specifically, reinforcement learning and genetic algorithms are used to construct sums of line bundles and monad bundles on smooth Calabi-Yau threefolds, for compactifications of E8xE8 heterotic string theory.