Title: The Next Phase Transition of the Universe: From Metastable Higgs Vacuum Decay to Broken Color and Charge Abstract: Our universe has already gone through a sequence of dramatic phase transitions—possibly including grand unification, electroweak symmetry breaking, and the QCD transition. However, this sequence may not be over yet. The Standard Model Higgs field may still reside in a metastable vacuum, and … Read More

Title: Electroweak Symmetry Restoration at High Energies Abstract: With the milestone discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC, detailed study of its properties becomes a high priority for collider physics. After a brief overview of the properties of the longitudinal gauge bosons and the Higgs boson, we revisit the Goldstone boson equivalence theorem and define the “electroweak symmetry restoration” (EWSR) … Read More

Title: Energy Correlators at the Collider Frontier Abstract: Extracting answers to major open problems in particle physics from the wealth of collider data demands fresh perspectives on quantum field theory and new methods for connecting theory to observations. Recently, significant attention has focused on detector operators, particularly energy correlators, due to their unique role at the crossroads of experiment, phenomenology, and formal … Read More

Title: Abelian Instantons in Quantum Field Theory and Gravity Abstract: I will discuss field configurations of Abelian gauge fields that carry non-zero second Chern number, generated by closed monopole worldlines in four-dimensional Euclidean space. These “Abelian instantons” render the electromagnetic vacuum angle physical. In the presence of gravity, magnetic monopoles that are Reissner-Nordstrom black holes naturally realize these field configurations. Including these … Read More

Abstract: Cosmological data provides us two key constraints on dark matter: it must have a particular abundance, and it must have an adiabatic spectrum of density perturbations in the early universe. Many different cosmological scenarios have been proposed that establish the abundance of axion dark matter in qualitatively different ways. In this talk, I will discuss that despite this variety of … Read More

Title: Cutting rule on cosmological correlators and its applications Abstract: We derive a cutting rule for equal-time in-in correlators, including cosmological correlators based on Keldysh r/a basis, which decomposes diagrams into fully retarded functions and cut-propagators consisting of Wightman functions. Our derivation relies only on basic assumptions such as unitarity, locality, and the causal structure of the in-in formalism. We apply the … Read More

Title: Jets as a Model of Data Abstract: Natural datasets — including images, video, and language — are richly-structured yet opaque, and we lack a first‑principles model of the data-generating process. Most theoretical work to date has focused on toy models of Gaussian data, which are analytically tractable but are far too simple to describe the real world. I will argue that … Read More

Title: 2D U(1) Chiral gauge theory on a computer Abstract: I will discuss general U(1) gauge theories in 2D compactified on S^1 in Hamiltonian formalism. The physical states are constructed, and matrix elements of the Hamiltonian are computed. The theory is formulated in the continuum, so chiral symmetries are exact and chiral anomalies and the expected dependence on the theta … Read More