Particles and Gravitation

The holographic correspondence AdS/CFT is a powerful duality that connects a theory of gravity in anti-de Sitter space with a (quantum) conformal field theory that lives on the boundary of the spacetime. In this context, the Ryu-Takayanagi formula allows to compute entanglement entropies of CFTs by computing the area of an extremal surface that extends from the boundary into the bulk of AdS. In this project we will use this formula and apply it to the case of black hole solutions, which represent thermal states.

When the densest stars in the universe (neutron star or neutron star-black hole pairs) orbit each other, they get closer due to emitted gravitational radiation. Neutron stars have a solid exterior crust that may shatter in this extreme encounters. In this project, you will explore whether the star can shatter like a glass does when a singer hits its resonant note. This depends on the properties of dense matter and, in particular, on the symmetry energy parameter that is predicted from nuclear physics.

The LHCb detector is one of the main experiments at the LHC at CERN, specialized on the study of CP breaking and rare decays of b hadrons. Semileptonic transitions of a b quark to an s quark and two leptons (b -> sll) have been intensively studied during the last decade, with some hints of potential new physics effects. The analogous transitions with a d quark in the final state (b -> dll) are more suppressed in the Standard Model and thus highly sensitive to potential new physics effects, at even higher scales.

The Standard Model of Cosmology, the so-called ΛCDM model [1], is afflicted by

The solution of quantum field theories is one of the most challenging topics in modern theoretical physics. Recently, promising advances have relied on the use of variational approaches that exploit machine learning techniques [1]. These approaches encode the gauge symmetries in the architecture of neural networks [2], which provides advantages with respect to other sampling techniques [3]. Variational solutions to quantum field theories can be then exploited to find numerical solutions to these problems [4].  

Traditionally, the determination of two-particle momentum correlations in relativistic heavy ion collisions has been viewed as a tool to explore the space-time evolution of the emitting. However nowadays the precise experimental data and new theoretical techniques, the so called femtoscopy, allow the possibility to go further and to extract information about the interaction between these two particles.

The quark-gluon plasma is a new state of matter that can be formed by colliding heavy ions at ultrarelativistic velocities. From all the particles formed in these collisions, heavy quarkonium is one of the most promosing probes to obtain information about this new state of matter. One of the most succesful approaches to the study of the evolution of quarkonium in a medium is to model it as a Markovian open quantum system. Recently, it has been found using this approach that regeneration is crucial to reproduce experimental data on quarkonium excited states.