Events at 402 Classroom Physics South Hall, Campus

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Abstract: The affine Hecke category, defined using affine Soergel bimodules, categorifies the affine Hecke algebra. I will compare the derived horizontal trace of the affine Hecke category with the elliptic Hall algebra, and with the derived category of the commuting stack. In particular, I will describe certain explicit generators for the trace category and some categorical commutation relations between these. … Read More

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Vacuum fluctuations of the gravitational field lead to fluctuations in the measured length of an interferometer, such as LIGO. It has been suggested that due to some exotic quantum gravity effects, these fluctuations could be large enough to be observed. I will give two calculations using standard perturbative gravity viewed as an effective field theory, one purely geometrical and one … Read More

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Abstract: I propose a bottom-up correspondence between a CFT defined on 2D non-orientable manifolds, such as the real projective plane (RP2) and the Klein bottle (K2), and AdS3 Einstein gravity with dS2 end-of-the-world branes. In this correspondence, a global dS2 end-of-the-world brane (a quotient by Z2) is described by the unitary time evolution of a crosscap state in the CFT, post-selected … Read More

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Abstract: We present a careful study of the chiral symmetry breaking minima and other potential minima in supersymmetric symplectic QCD (Sp(N) with F flavors) perturbed by Anomaly Mediated Supersymmetry Breaking (AMSB). Although the case of F = N+1 requires particular care due to the inherently strongly coupled nature of the quantum modified moduli space, we are able to show that … Read More

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Abstract: The correspondence of AGT sets up, in part, a connection between six-dimensional superconformal theories and 2d CFT. We will give a mathematical construction of 2d CFT from 6d SCFT which involves recent progress in our understanding of the holomorphic twist 6d superconformal symmetry. We then turn to the question of enhancement of familiar structures in 2d CFT to 6d … Read More

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Abstract: Symplectic geometry plays a crucial role in string theory through the lens of mirror symmetry, a duality that connects it to complex geometry. This connection is formalized in M. Kontsevich’s celebrated 1994 ICM conjecture on homological mirror symmetry (HMS), providing a powerful algebraic framework to study these dualities. While HMS has been established for mirrors of Calabi-Yau and Fano … Read More

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I will discuss the quantisation of de Sitter JT gravity in the canonical formalism to illustrate constructions of Hilbert spaces in quantum gravity.  Our aim is a description of states which makes spacetime locality manifest with a positive inner product, which is challenging due to the Hamiltonian constraints.  The key ideas include representing states either as “invariants” (solutions to the Wheeler-DeWitt … Read More