Glassy slowdown and replica instantons
Supercooled liquids exhibit a dramatic dynamical slowdown as the temperature is lowered. This can be attributed to relaxation proceeding via large structural rearrangements, whose characteristic size increases as the temperature decreases. These cooperative rearrangements are well modeled by instantons in a replica effective field theory, with the size of the dominant instanton encoding the liquid’s cavity point-to-set correlation length. We show that, for a wide range of parameters, a novel class of replica-symmetry-breaking instantons dominates. We systematically construct these instantons and explore the subtle energetics governing their existence. Our methods extend naturally to the full parameter space of the replica effective theory, laying the groundwork for a complete analysis of point-to-set correlations in glassy systems.

title: Critical Exponents for Supercooled Liquids
abstract: We compute critical exponents governing universal features of supercooled liquids through the effective theory of an overlap field. The correlation length diverges with the Ising exponent; the size of dynamically heterogeneous patches grows more rapidly; and the relaxation time obeys a generalized Vogel-Fulcher-Tammann relation.

title: GLSMs for non-Kähler geometries
abstract: A bstractWe identify a simple mechanism by which H-flux satisfying the modified Bianchi identity arises in garden-variety (0, 2) gauged linear sigma models. Taking suitable limits leads to effective gauged linear sigma models with Green-Schwarz anomaly cancellation. We test the quantum-consistency of a class of such effective theories by constructing an off-shell superconformal algebra, identifying unexpected topological constraints on the existence of this algebra and providing evidence that these models run to good CFTs in the deep IR when all of the constraints are satisfied.

title: The N=8$$ \mathcal{N}=8 $$ superconformal bootstrap in three dimensions
abstract: A bstractWe analyze the constraints imposed by unitarity and crossing symmetry on the four-point function of the stress-tensor multiplet of N=8$$ \mathcal{N}=8 $$ superconformal field theories in three dimensions. We first derive the superconformal blocks by analyzing the superconformal Ward identity. Our results imply that the OPE of the primary operator of the stress-tensor multiplet with itself must have parity symmetry. We then analyze the relations between the crossing equations, and we find that these equations are mostly redundant. We implement the independent crossing constraints numerically and find bounds on OPE coefficients and operator dimensions as a function of the stress-tensor central charge. To make contact with known N=8$$ \mathcal{N}=8 $$ superconformal field theories, we compute this central charge in a few particular cases using supersymmetric localization. For limiting values of the central charge, our numerical bounds are nearly saturated by the large N limit of ABJM theory and also by the free U(1) × U(1) ABJM theory.

title: Weakly-bound Hadronic Molecule near a 3-body Threshold
abstract: The X(3872) seems to be a loosely-bound hadronic molecule whose constituents are two charm mesons. A novel feature of this molecule is that the mass difference of the constituents is close to the mass of a lighter meson that can be exchanged between them, namely, the pion. We analyze this feature in a simple model with spin-0 mesons only. Various observables are calculated to next-to-leading order in the interaction strength of the exchanged meson. Renormalization requires summing a geometric series of next-to-leading order corrections. The dependence of observables on the ultraviolet cutoff can be removed by renormalizations of the mass of the heaviest meson, the coupling constant for the contact interaction between the heavy mesons, and short-distance coefficients in the operator product expansion. The next-to-leading order correction has an unphysical infrared divergence at the threshold of the two heavier mesons that can be eliminated by a further resummation that takes into account the nonzero width of the heaviest meson.

title: Higgs Mediated EDMs in the Next-to-MSSM: An Application to Electroweak Baryogenesis
abstract: We perform a study on the predictions of electric-dipole moments (EDMs) of neutron, Mercury (Hg), Thallium (Tl), deuteron, and Radium (Ra) in the framework of next-to-minimal supersymmetric standard model (NMSSM) with CP-violating parameters in the superpotential and soft-supersymmetry-breaking sector. We confine to the case in which only the physical tree-level CP phase $(\phi'_\lambda - \phi'_\kappa)$, associated with the couplings of the singlet terms in the superpotential and with the vacuum-expectation-values (VEVs), takes on a nonzero value. We found that the one-loop contributions from neutralinos are mostly small while the two-loop Higgs-mediated contributions of the Barr-Zee (BZ) type diagrams dominate. We emphasize a scenario motivated by electroweak baryogenesis.

title: Background electromagnetic fields and nonrelativistic QED matching: Scalar case
abstract: The low-energy structure of hadrons can be described systematically using effective field theory, and the parameters of the effective theory can be determined from lattice QCD computations. Recent work, however, points to inconsistencies between the background field method in lattice QCD and effective field theory matching conditions. We show that the background field problem necessitates inclusion of operators related by equations of motion. In the presence of time-dependent electromagnetic fields, for example, such operators modify Green's functions, thereby complicating the isolation of hadronic parameters which enter on-shell scattering amplitudes. The particularly simple case of a scalar hadron coupled to uniform electromagnetic fields is investigated in detail. At the level of the relativistic effective theory, operators related by equations of motion are demonstrated to be innocuous. The same result does not hold in the non-relativistic effective theory, and inconsistencies in matching are resolved by carefully treating operators related by equations of motion. As uniform external fields potentially allow for surface terms, the problem is additionally analyzed on a torus where such terms are absent. Finite-size corrections are derived for charged scalar correlation functions in uniform electric fields as a useful byproduct.

title: Zero cosmological constant and nonzero dark energy from the holographic principle
abstract: The first law of thermodynamics and the holographic principle applied to an arbitrary large cosmic causal horizon are shown to naturally demand a zero cosmological constant and a non-zero dynamical dark energy in the form of the holographic dark energy. A semiclassical analysis shows that the holographic dark energy has a parameter d = 1 and an equation of state comparable to current observational data if the entropy of the horizon saturates the Bekenstein-Hawking bound. This result indicates that quantum field theory should be modified on a large scale to explain the dark energy. The relations among the dark energy, the quantum vacuum energy and the entropic gravity are also discussed.

title: Listening to Noise
abstract: We show how sign problems in simulations of many-body systems can manifest themselves in the form of heavy-tailed correlator distributions, similar to what is seen in electron propagation through disordered media. We propose an alternative statistical approach for extracting ground state energies in such systems, illustrating the method with a toy model and with lattice data for unitary fermions and for baryons in QCD.