Talks will talk place on Thursdays at 2:00pm in the 5th floor SCGP common room, unless stated otherwise in the announcement.
Schedule:
| Date | Name | Title | Abstract |
| Sept 04 2025 | Alexander Frenkel | Confusions about Matrices and Black Holes and Emergent Gravity | I will selfishly co-opt this journal club to talk about a list of questions (and confusions) that interest me regarding emergent geometry from matrix quantum mechanics, that I am hoping to work on in the near future or simply have someone tell me the answer to. I will start with a pedagogical review/introduction, then the range of topics will roughly include (some subset of): the role of non-singlet excitations in black hole entropy and eigenvalue distributions for models with multiple matrices, ER = EPR and transitions in topology of the emergent space, the emergence of the black hole interior, and how to set up and study quantum singularities. |
| Sept 11 2025 | Arkya Chatterjee | Non-invertible self-duality symmetries in qudit models | The self-duality of the 1+1d quantum Ising model under gauging its Z_2 symmetry underlies the non-invertible Kramers-Wannier symmetry of its critical point. This has a natural generalization to self-dual Hopf algebras, which will be the main subject of this talk. Along the way, we will discuss how Hopf qudits realize all 1+1d anomaly-free finite generalized symmetries in lattice models with tensor product Hilbert spaces. Allowing the symmetry algebra on the lattice to mix with translation symmetry further leads us to a large family of anomalous non-invertible symmetries. We will contextualize this discussion with the Kac-Paljutkin algebra H_8, writing down some simple Hamiltonians that enjoy the associated self-duality symmetry. |
| Sept 18 2025 | Vasilii Iugov | Yang-Mills flows and magic angles in Twisted Bilayer Graphene | I will discuss the Yang–Mills flow on the space of connections on a two-torus and its application to the problem of magic angles. In the chiral limit, the TBG Hamiltonian reduces to a two-dimensional chiral Dirac operator coupled to an SU(2) gauge field parametrized by the twist angle. In this framework, magic angles correspond to unstable SU(2) connections. I will compute the codimension of the subspace of unstable connections and show that, once rotational symmetry of TBG is taken into account, it matches the codimension of the set of magic angles. The talk is based on 2504.19097, joint with Nikita Nekrasov. |
| Sept 25 2025 | Maria Nocchi | A double-copy picture of strings in AdS | The Kawai–Lewellen–Tye (KLT) relations are a striking example of how string theory can reveal hidden structures and connect a web of, in principle, very different theories. Originally, they state that (tree-level) closed-string amplitudes can be expressed as quadratic combinations of open-string amplitudes. In the field theory limit, this gives rise to the celebrated double-copy between gluons and gravitons. In this talk, we will explore how much of this elegant structure persists when we move from flat space to AdS. As a first step, I will propose the fundamental building blocks of tree-level open- and closed-string amplitudes in AdS and show how they are related via an AdS version of the KLT relations. This structure not only significantly simplifies explicit calculations but also points to deeper algebraic and geometric structures that remain to be uncovered. |
| Oct 2 2025 | Alessio Miscioscia | ||
| Oct 9 2025 | Matteo Sacchi | ||
| Oct 16 2025 | Jake McNamara |
| Oct 23 | Sebastian Harris | ||
| Oct 30 | Justin Kulp | Do null lines dream of conformal symmetry? | |
| Nov 6 2025 | |||
| Nov 13 2025 | |||
| Nov 20 2025 | |||
| Nov 27 2025 | |||
| Dec 5 2025 | |||
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| Nov 19 2025 |