Colloquium

The study of strongly  interacting quantum matter has been at the forefront of condensed matter research in the last several decades. An independent development is the discovery of topological band insulators.  In this talk I will  describe phenomena that occur at the confluence of topology and strong interactions.

In some of the planet's most extreme environments scientists are constructing enormous detectors to study the very rare interactions produced by neutrinos. In particular, at South Pole Station Antarctica more than a cubic kilometer of the deep glacial ice has been instrumented to construct the world's largest neutrino detector to date: the IceCube Neutrino Observatory.

Hidden sector particles, with masses and couplings below those of the weak interactions, can resolve many of the outstanding questions of the Standard Model, including the identity of dark matter, the origin of the baryon asymmetry, and the physics of neutrino masses. Existing searches at colliders such as the Large Hadron Collider are, however, often insensitive to signals of hidden sectors. Using the well-motivated example of low-scale leptogenesis and neutrino masses, I will demonstrate connections between the cosmology of hidden sectors and their signatures in experiments.

Current progress in quantum field theory is largely driven by the conformal bootstrap program, which aims to classify the space and properties of conformal field theories using symmetries and other fundamental constraints. In the context of the AdS/CFT Correspondence, this increasingly sophisticated endeavor doubles as a probe of foundations of quantum gravity.