Tuesdays 10:30 - 11:30 | Fridays 11:30 - 12:30
Showing votes from 2019-11-12 11:30 to 2019-11-15 12:30 | Next meeting is Tuesday Jul 22nd, 10:30 am.
Gravitational waves from binary black holes that are gravitationally lensed can be distorted by small microlenses along the line of sight. Microlenses with masses of a few tens of solar masses, and that are close to a critical curve in the lens plane, can introduce a time delay of a few millisecond. Such time delay would result in distinctive interference patterns in the gravitational wave that can be measured with current experiments such as LIGO/Virgo. We consider the particular case of primordial black holes with masses between 5 and 50 solar masses acting as microlenses. We study the effect of a population of primordial black holes constituting a fraction of the dark matter, and contained in a macrolens (galaxy or cluster), over gravitational waves that are being lensed by the combined effect of the macrolens plus microlenses. We find that at the typical magnifications expected for observed GW events, the fraction of dark matter in the form of compact microlenses, such as primordial black holes, can be constrained to percent level. Similarly, if a small percentage of the dark matter is in the form of microlenses with a few tens of solar masses, at sufficiently large magnification factors, all gravitational waves will show interference effects. These effects could have an impact on the inferred parameters. The effect is more important for macroimages with negative parity, which usually arrive after the macroimages with positive parity.
We discuss the possibility to predict the QCD axion mass in the context of grand unified theories. We investigate the implementation of the DFSZ mechanism in the context of renormalizable SU(5) theories. In the simplest theory, the axion mass can be predicted with good precision in the range $m_a = (2-16)$ neV, and there is a strong correlation between the predictions for the axion mass and proton decay rates. In this context, we predict an upper bound for the proton decay channels with antineutrinos, $\tau(p\to K^+ \bar{\nu}) \lesssim 4 \times 10^{37} \text{ yr}$ and $\tau(p \to \pi^+ \bar{\nu}) \lesssim 2 \times 10^{36}\text{ yr}$. This theory can be considered as the minimal realistic grand unified theory with the DFSZ mechanism and it can be fully tested by proton decay and axion experiments.
The $T \bar T$ deformation of a 2 dimensional field theory living on a curved spacetime is classically equivalent to coupling the undeformed field theory to 2 dimensional `ghost-free' massive gravity. We derive the equivalence classically, and using a path integral formulation of the random geometries proposal, which mirrors the holographic bulk cutoff picture. We emphasize the role of the massive gravity St\"uckelberg fields which describe the diffeomorphism between the two metrics. For a general field theory, the dynamics of the St\"uckelberg fields is non-trivial, however for a CFT it trivializes and becomes equivalent to an additional pair of target space dimensions with associated curved target space geometry and dynamical worldsheet metric. That is, the $T \bar T$ deformation of a CFT on curved spacetime is equivalent to a non-critical string theory in Polyakov form. We give a direct proof of the equivalence classically without relying on gauge fixing, and determine the explicit form for the classical Hamiltonian of the $T\bar T$ deformation of an arbitrary CFT on a curved spacetime. When the QFT action is a sum of a CFT plus an operator of fixed scaling dimension, as for example in the sine-Gordon model, the equivalence to a non-critical theory string holds with a modified target space metric and an additional potential. Finally we give a stochastic path integral formulation for the general $T \bar T+J \bar T+T \bar J$ deformation of a general QFT, and show that it reproduces a recent path integral proposal in the literature.