Jasper van de Kreekev (UCB) ” Deformed Mirror Symmetry for Punctured Surfaces”
Mirror symmetry aims at equivalences of Fukaya categories (A-side) and categories of coherent sheaves (B-side). Deformed mirror symmetry aims at matching deformations of A-side and B-side. In this talk, I explain how to do it in case of mirror symmetry for punctured surfaces. We start by constructing gentle algebras and matrix factorizations, which serve as A-side and B-side. Then we … Read More
Victoria Xu (UCB) “A decade and a day: 10 years of gravitational-wave detections with LIGO”
Abstract: The NSF’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) made the historic first observation of gravitational-waves (GWs) from a binary black hole merger on September 14, 2015 — almost exactly 10 years prior to the day of this talk. Here, we celebrate the 10-year anniversary of LIGO’s first direct detection by sharing the newest gravitational-wave event catalogue, GWTC-4.0, from our international LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA … Read More
Douglas Stanford (Stanford) “Cusps as counterterms in 3d gravity”
Three dimensional hyperbolic manifolds have accumulation points in the spectrum of their volumes, leading to a divergence in the sum over topologies. The limit points are cusped hyperbolic manifolds, and we propose to renormalize the sum by including the cusped manifold as a counterterm. This gives a reinterpretation of the zeta-function regularization procedure used by Maloney and Witten in the … Read More
Zhiquan Sun (UC Berkeley) “Energy Correlators as a probe of Nonperturbative QCD”
Abstract: Energy correlators are a class of cleverly constructed collider observables that provides unique insights into the field theory structure and phenomenology of QCD. In this talk, I study the leading nonperturbative contribution to energy correlators using field theory methods and discuss the universality across event shape observables of such contributions. I show that correctly including the nonperturbative improves our … Read More
Glennys Farrar (NYU) “Origin of Ultrahigh Energy Cosmic Rays in Binary Neutron Star Mergers”
I will briefly review the observations of UHECRs, emphasizing which aspects are robust and which remain uncertain. Among the robust aspects, a key feature of the data strongly suggests that UHECRs are produced in BNS mergers. Taking advantage of the well-defined initial conditions, I will identify the likely acceleration mechanism and explain how the spectral cutoff is determined. The resulting … Read More