iTHEMS Theoretical Physics Seminar
66 events
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Seminar Tomorrow
Role of self-gravity on the central halo structure of fuzzy dark matter
April 30 (Tue) at 13:30 - 15:00, 2024
Yusuke Manita (Affiliated Scientist, Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto University)
Fuzzy dark matter (FDM) is a dark matter model that is characterized by the ultralight masses around 10−22 eV. As FDM has the wave-like nature, the self-gravitating structure is described by the Schrödinger-Poisson equation. Previous simulations based on the Schrödinger-Poisson equation have demonstrated that soliton-like structure having a high-density flat core is formed at the central region of the FDM halos, and the size of such a core is typically determined by the de Broglie wavelength. Away from the central core, the density profile of the FDM halos resembles that of the cold dark matter halos on average, and is shown to be described by the Navarro-Frenk-White (NFW) profile. In this paper, we study the role of the self-gravity of the soliton core, and its relation to the bulk halo properties by solving the Schrödinger-Poisson equation in a simplified setup. The findings indicate that the contribution from the soliton self-gravity must dominate over the NFW potential in order to sustain the soliton.
Venue: Hybrid Format (3F #359 and Zoom), Main Research Building
Event Official Language: English
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Seminar
A night out with ghosts
April 24 (Wed) at 16:00 - 17:30, 2024
Veronica Errasti Diez (Research Fellow, Faculty of Physics, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany)
Field theories are the chief theoretical framework for physics. For instance, the Standard Model and General Relativity are widely accepted as accounting for subatomic particle and gravitational behavior, respectively. Nonetheless, even such acclaimed field theories have their limitations, such as the mysterious neutrino masses and dark sector. A natural and popular way around the hurdles consists in generalizations of field theories, via the inclusion of non-linear and/or higher-order corrections. Unless painstakingly avoided, these corrections lead to the propagation of negative kinetic energy modes, or ghosts for short. Ghosts have earned an appalling fame: kill, exorcise, avoid… No efforts are spared to guarantee their absence. In this talk, we will delve into the root causes for the ill name of ghosts. As a result, we will take up the cudgels for ghosts. While they do have a strong tendency to yield ill-behaved theories, ghosts are not intrinsically pathological. As we will see, good-natured ghosts open the door to multi-disciplinary tantalizing opportunities…! And ghosts make excellent party-goers, so make sure not to miss this appointment!
Venue: Hybrid Format (3F #359 and Zoom), Main Research Building
Event Official Language: English
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Seminar
Short-Lived Hawking Radiation Under Stringy Effects
April 11 (Thu) at 13:30 - 15:00, 2024
Wei-Hsiang Shao (Ph.D. Student, Department of Physics, National Taiwan University, Taiwan)
A UV theory is required in order to describe the origin of late-time Hawking radiation. In this talk, I will explore Hawking radiation in a non-local model of the radiation field inspired by Witten's open string field theory. An attempt at extracting the correlators of this theory will be discussed, which leads to a space-time uncertainty relation. As a result, the characteristics of trans-Planckian field modes differ significantly from that in the standard low-energy effective theory, and I will argue that this ultimately results in the termination of Hawking radiation around the scrambling time of the black hole.
Venue: Hybrid Format (3F #359 and Zoom), Main Research Building
Event Official Language: English
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Seminar
Brane field theory with higher-form symmetry
March 12 (Tue) at 14:00 - 15:30, 2024
Kiyoharu Kawana (Research Fellow, Korea Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS), Republic of Korea)
We propose field theory for branes with higher-form symmetry as a generalization of ordinary Landau theory. The field \psi[C_p^{}] becomes a functional of p-dimensional closed brane Cp embedded in a spacetime. As a natural generalization of ordinary field theory, we call this theory brane field theory. In order to construct an action that is invariant under higher-form transformation, we first generalize the concept of “derivative” for higher-dimensional objects. Then, we discuss various fundamental properties of the brane field based on the higher-form invariant action. It is shown that the classical solution exhibits the area law in the unbroken phase of U(1) p-form symmetry, while it indicates a constant behavior in the broken phase for the large volume limit of Cp. In the latter case, the low-energy effective theory is described by the p-form Maxwell theory. If time permits, we also discuss brane-field theories with a discrete higher-form symmetry and show that the low-energy effective theory becomes a BF-type topological field theory, resulting in topological order.
Venue: Hybrid Format (3F #359 and Zoom), Main Research Building
Event Official Language: English
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Seminar
Stochastic tunneling in de Sitter spacetime
February 28 (Wed) at 16:00 - 17:30, 2024
Taiga Miyachi (Ph.D. Student, Institute of Cosmophysics, Department of Physics, Graduate School of Science, Kobe University)
The formulation of tunneling in real time formalism is discussed. In the case of de Sitter spacetime, there is a method called the stochastic approach, which is known to reproduce the tunneling predicted by Hawking and Moss in the imaginary time formalism. In the case of accelerated expansion of space, the short-wavelength modes are stretched and transformed into long-wavelength modes. In the stochastic approach, such UV-IR transition is incorporated as quantum noise, and the dynamics of the long-wavelength modes are described by stochastic differential equations. In this talk, we construct a Schwinger-Keldysh path integral that reproduces this stochastic differential equation and reformulate the tunneling probability. We also reproduce the Hawking-Moss tunneling probabilities by using the saddle point approximation.
Venue: Seminar Room #359 (Main Venue) / via Zoom
Event Official Language: English
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Seminar
Recent advances in nuclear Density Functional Theory and applications to the nuclear response
February 6 (Tue) at 13:30 - 15:00, 2024
Gianluca Colò (Professor, Department of Physics, University of Milan, Italy / Professor, Sezione di Milano, INFN, Italy)
In this contribution, I will give an overall (and, of course, biased) view of the general status of DFT. I will stress that, in contrast to ab initio methods, DFT is the only framework that allows the study of excited states, including those lying at relatively high energy. Accordingly, I will focus on the nuclear response. After a reminder on the nuclear Giant Resonances and the link with the nuclear equation of state, I will discuss the projection methods to restore symmetries in the calculations of deformed systems. While symmetry-restored calculations are nowadays of common use in the study of ground-state properties and low-lying excitations, similar realistic investigations for the nuclear response are essentially missing in the literature. Recently, we have implemented an exact Angular Momentum Projection (AMP) on top of Skyrme-Random Phase Approximation (RPA) calculations in a projection after variation (PAV) scheme, for the first time. The results will be critically analysed in the case of the monopole response, also taking into account the experimental investigations that can be envisioned for well-deformed systems. If time allows, the nuclear response will be also discussed as a way to improve the current density functionals and ground them on ab initio nuclear theory. This seminar is co-hosted by Nuclear Many-body Theory Laboratory and Few-body Systems in Physics Laboratory, RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science.
Venue: 2F Large Meeting Room, RIBF Building, RIKEN Wako Campus (Main Venue) / via Zoom
Event Official Language: English
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Seminar
Nuclear Energy-Density Functional Approach to Bridging Neutron-Rich Nuclei and Neutron Stars
February 5 (Mon) at 13:30 - 15:00, 2024
Kenichi Yoshida (Associate Professor, Research Center for Nuclear Physics, Osaka University)
Understanding the properties of neutron-rich nuclei has been a central subject in low-energy nuclear physics. The great interest lies not only in the pursuit of a variety of structures and the elucidation of the mechanisms of their occurrence but also in obtaining insights into the structure of the inner crust of neutron stars. With advances in neutron-star observation techniques, the structure of neutron stars has been becoming better understood. The data accumulated from these observations unveil properties of neutron-rich matter that are otherwise inaccessible through terrestrial experiments. In this talk, I will introduce an attempt to construct a nuclear energy-density functional (EDF) inspired by the observations and then demonstrate its applicability to nuclear structure problems, including mass and deformation. One intriguing aspect of neutron stars is the emergence of superfluidity, especially the occurrence of spin-triplet pairing. I will discuss the unconventional pairing in nuclei within the nuclear EDF framework and give perspectives on the study of the phase diagram of the superfluidity in neutron stars. This seminar is co-hosted by UKAKUREN.
Venue: Seminar Room #359 (Main Venue) / via Zoom
Event Official Language: English
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Seminar
Quantum features in cosmological perturbations?
January 18 (Thu) at 14:15 - 15:00, 2024
Amaury Micheli (Postdoctoral Researcher, iTHEMS)
The statistical properties of the CMB anisotropies, reflecting the curvature inhomogeneities in the very early Universe, are very well accounted for by assuming that the inhomogeneities come from amplified vacuum fluctuations. This scenario makes the cosmological perturbations a possible observational window on the interplay between quantum degrees of freedom and gravity. I will review the discussions on the current presence or absence of quantum features in the perturbations, emphasising the quantum information approaches to this question, and comment on the observability of these features.
Venue: Hybrid Format (3F #359 and Zoom), Main Research Building
Event Official Language: English
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Seminar
Gravitational lensing on superposed curved spacetime
January 18 (Thu) at 13:30 - 14:15, 2024
Youka Kaku (Ph.D. Student, Graduate School of Science, Nagoya University)
In 2017, Bose et al. proposed a tabletop experiment to observe the gravitational effect induced by a spatially superposed mass source, particularly gravity-induced entanglement. This experiment is expected to be the first step in exploring the quantum nature of gravity. Also, there are ongoing efforts to extend their proposal to the relativistic region to observe the unique quantum nature of gravity. In this talk, I will investigate gravitational lensing in a weak gravitational field induced by a spatially superposed mass source. I will show the Einstein ring image of a quantum scalar field propagated on a superposed curved spacetime and compare it with the image of the semi-classical gravity case. This work is currently in progress and is a collaboration with Yasusada Nambu.
Venue: Hybrid Format (3F #359 and Zoom), Main Research Building
Event Official Language: English
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Seminar
Symmetry Topological field theory for Subsystem symmetry
January 9 (Tue) at 15:00 - 16:00, 2024
Qiang Jia (Research Fellow, School of Physics, Korea Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS), Republic of Korea)
We generalize the idea of symmetry topological field theory (SymTFT) to subsystem symmetry. We propose the 2-foliated BF theory with level N in (3+1)d as subsystem SymTFT for subsystem Z_N symmetry in (2+1)d. Focusing on N=2, we investigate various topological boundaries. The subsystem Kramers-Wannier and Jordan-Wigner dualities can be viewed as boundary transformations of the subsystem SymTFT and are included in a larger duality web from the subsystem SL(2,Z_2) symmetry of the bulk foliated BF theory.
Venue: via Zoom / Seminar Room #359
Event Official Language: English
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Seminar
Inflationary Cosmology with a scalar-curvature mixing term $\frac{1}{2} \xi R \phi^2$
December 20 (Wed) at 16:00 - 17:30, 2023
Payel Sarkar (Visiting Researcher, Kyoto University)
We use the PLANCK 2018 and the WMAP data to constraint inflation models driven by a scalar field $\phi$ in the presence of the non-minimal scalar-curvature mixing term $\frac{1}{2}\xi R \phi^2$. We consider four distinct scalar field potentials $\phi^p e^{-\lambda\phi},~(1 - \phi^{p})e^{-\lambda\phi},~(1-\lambda\phi)^p$ and $\frac{\alpha\phi^2}{1+\alpha\phi^2}$ to study inflation in the non-minimal gravity theory. We calculate the potential slow-roll parameters, predict the scalar spectral index $n_s$, tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$, leading and higher order non-Gaussianity parameters ($f_{NL},~\tau_{NL}$ and $g_{NL}$) and the amplitude of the scalar spectrum $A_s$ in the parameter ($\lambda, p, \alpha$) space of the potentials corresponding to different values of the non-minimal coupling parameter $\xi$. We have compared our results with the ones existing in the literature, and this indicates the present status of non-minimal inflation after the release of the PLANCK 2018 data.
Venue: Hybrid Format (3F #359 and Zoom), Main Research Building (Main Venue) / via Zoom
Event Official Language: English
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Seminar
Gravitational Lensing in Black Hole Spacetimes of the Plebanski-Demianski Class
December 6 (Wed) at 16:00 - 17:30, 2023
Torben Christian Frost (Postdoctoral Researcher, Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Peking University, China)
Einstein's field equations allow various different black hole solutions. Among these solutions, the most famous are most likely the Schwarzschild and the Kerr spacetimes, which are both special cases of the so-called Plebanski-Demianski spacetime. Besides the Schwarzschild and Kerr spacetimes, the Plebanski-Demianski spacetime also includes other solutions as special cases, among them the C-metric and the NUT metric. They describe a linearly accelerating black hole and a black hole with gravitomagnetic charge, respectively. The question is now how we can determine if an astrophysical black hole can be described by one of these spacetimes. We will address this question using gravitational lensing for the three spacetimes with the most salient lensing features, namely the C-metric, the NUT metric, and the Kerr metric. For this purpose, we will first outline how to solve the equations of motion analytically using elementary and Jacobi's elliptic functions as well as Legendre's elliptic integrals. Then we will fix an observer in the domain of outer communication and relate the constants of motion of the lightlike geodesics to latitude-longitude coordinates on the observer's celestial sphere. We will use the analytic solutions to write down the lens equations, calculate the redshift, and the travel time. Finally, we will discuss and compare the results and comment on how we can use them to place constraints on the spin parameter, the acceleration parameter, and the gravitomagnetic charge of a black hole.
Venue: Seminar Room #359 (Main Venue) / via Zoom
Event Official Language: English
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Seminar
Rotating discs on the Kerr black hole background
December 5 (Tue) at 15:00 - 16:30, 2023
David Kofroň (Postdoctoral Researcher, Institute of Theoretical Physics, Charles University, Czechia)
Analytical solution of a rotating black hole surrounded by accretion disc in full GR is, so far, unknown. The Ernst equation is nonlinear. In this talk, we will provide a framework in which the solutions of linearised Ernst equations can be obtained from the linear perturbations of Kerr black hole treated in the formalism of the Debye potentials. In this way, we recover all the metric perturbations in term of a single complex scalar function (which solves the Laplace equation).
Venue: Seminar Room #359 (Main Venue) / via Zoom
Event Official Language: English
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Seminar
Gravity of Accretion Discs and Black Holes
December 5 (Tue) at 14:00 - 15:00, 2023
Petr Kotlařík (Ph.D. Student, Institute of Theoretical Physics, Charles University, Czechia)
The typical black hole solutions describe only isolated black holes. However, in astrophysics, such a condition is never strictly satisfied. As matter accretes onto the black hole, disc structures are often formed. In this talk, I will summarize our recent attempts to find the gravitational field of such a nonisolated black hole. We start from the simplest case of static and axially symmetric metric. Although it is a somewhat "rough" approximation in the astrophysical context, this idealization may already help us to understand some interesting implications of the disc's gravity. Moreover, with such a simplification, we can obtain exact analytical "superpositions" of the Schwarzchild black hole and a disc. When some rotation is present, dragging effects complicate the situation dramatically. Then, one typically has to resort to numerical relativity or some approximate methods, e.g., perturbations. In the talk, I also address the stationary case and demonstrate what we can do on the level of the direct metric perturbation.
Venue: Seminar Room #359 (Main Venue) / via Zoom
Event Official Language: English
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Seminar
Breaking down the magnonic Wiedemann-Franz law in the hydrodynamic regime
December 4 (Mon) at 15:00 - 16:30, 2023
Ryotaro Sano (Ph.D. Student, Division of Physics and Astronomy, Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University)
Quantum transport has attracted a profound growth of interest owing to its fundamental importance and many applications in condensed matter physics. Recent significant developments in experimental techniques have further boosted the study of quantum transport. Notably in ultraclean systems, strong interactions between quasi-particles drastically affect the transport properties, resulting in an emergent hydrodynamic behavior. Recent experiments on ultrapure ferromagnetic insulators have opened up new pathways for magnon hydrodynamics. Hydrodynamic magnon transport implies exhibiting extraordinary features and has a potential for innovative functionalities beyond the conventional non-interacting magnon picture. However, the direct observation of magnon fluids remains an open issue due to the lack of probes to access the time and length scales characteristics of this regime. In this work, we derive a set of coupled hydrodynamic equations for a magnon fluid and study the spin and thermal conductivities by focusing on the most dominant time scales [1]. As a hallmark of the hydrodynamic regime, we reveal that the ratio between the two conductivities shows a large deviation from the so-called magnonic WF law. We also identify an origin of the drastic breakdown of the magnonic WF law as the difference in relaxation processes between spin and heat currents, which is unique to the hydrodynamic regime. Therefore, our results will become key evidence for an emergent hydrodynamic magnon behavior and lead to the direct observation of magnon fluids.
Venue: Hybrid Format (3F #359 and Zoom), Main Research Building
Event Official Language: English
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Seminar
Compact Star Solutions Beyond General Relativity
November 7 (Tue) at 13:30 - 15:00, 2023
Kota Numajiri (Ph.D. Student, Graduate School of Science, Nagoya University)
The neutron star solutions have been gathering attention. Their high compactness enables us to observationally access the information about extreme regimes of hadron physics. On the other hand, their strong gravity features bring up another possibility, gravity beyond general relativity (GR). Although GR has been a great success until now, the present scenario for our universe still has several problems, such as dark sectors and the quantum description of gravity. To tackle these problems, the modified gravity theories have been discussed for decades. Their modifications are expected to become noticeable in strong gravity regimes like compact stars. In this talk, I will discuss the configuration of the compact star solution under the F(R) gravity, one of the most popular and simplest modifications of GR. The background hydrostatic solutions are calculated with some F(R) models, which show non-trivial influences from the additional scalar DOF in this theory. The tidal deformation phenomenon is also considered to focus on another observable, tidal deformability. I will comment on how to utilize obtained observables to determine the gravity theory and the unknown equation of state simultaneously.
Venue: Seminar Room #359 (Main Venue) / via Zoom
Event Official Language: English
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Seminar
Topological Aspect of Adsorption Site Selectivity on Metal Surfaces
October 24 (Tue) at 13:30 - 15:00, 2023
Yuta Tsuji (Associate Professor, Faculty of Engineering Sciences, Kyushu University)
In this talk, the presenter will discuss which adsorption structure is preferred in the adsorption of atoms and molecules on metal surfaces based on the topology of the adsorption structures. The method of moments is used to analyze the electronic density of states of the surface. The third-order moment, which characterizes the skewness of the distribution of the electronic density of states, is related to the topology of the triangles at the adsorption interface. By further relating this to the change in energy of the system with the change in electron occupancy of the states, it is shown that it is possible to discuss the relationship between the type of metal and the topological features of the energetically stable adsorption structure.
Venue: Seminar Room #359 (Main Venue) / via Zoom
Event Official Language: English
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Seminar
First X-ray polarimetry of neutron stars with strong magnetic fields
September 25 (Mon) at 13:30 - 15:00, 2023
Toru Tamagawa (Chief Scientist, High Energy Astrophysics Laboratory, RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research (CPR))
We launched the world's first highly sensitive X-ray polarimetry satellite, IXPE, in December 2021. IXPE began observations in January 2022 and detected significant X-polarization from objects in all categories. The IXPE observations have opened a new window in astrophysics. In this talk, I will introduce IXPE and present the results of X-ray polarimetry observations of neutron stars with strong magnetic fields (magnetars and neutron star binaries). The neutron star observations show results quite different from our prior expectations and await further theoretical interpretation.
Venue: Seminar Room #359 (Main Venue) / via Zoom
Event Official Language: English
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Seminar
Induced gravitational waves from inflaton oscillons
September 22 (Fri) at 14:00 - 15:30, 2023
Kaloian Dimitrov Lozanov (Project Researcher, Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU), The University of Tokyo)
We present a new way to study cosmic inflation with gravitational waves. The gravitational signal is generated thanks to nonlinear structures in the inflaton field, called oscillons. This novel probe allows us to test models of inflation which are challenging to test with CMB experiments.
Venue: Hybrid Format (3F #359 and Zoom), Main Research Building
Event Official Language: English
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Seminar
Dark matter heating vs vortex creep heating in old neutron stars
August 7 (Mon) at 13:30 - 15:00, 2023
Motoko Fujiwara (Postdoctoral Researcher, Theoretical Particle Physics Group, Technical University of Munich, Germany)
Old isolated neutron stars have been gathering attention as targets to probe Dark Matter (DM) through temperature observations. DM will anomalously heat neutron stars through its gravitational capture and annihilation process, which predicts surface temperature as T_s ~ (1 − 3) × 10^3 K for t > 10^6 years. We may put constraints on DM-nucleon scattering cross section by finding even colder neutron stars. This story, however, assumed that there is no relevant heating source for old neutron stars. In this talk, we discuss the creep motion of vortex lines in the neutron superfluid of the inner crust as the heating mechanism. This creep mechanism is inherent in the structure of neutron stars. The heating luminosity is proportional to the time derivative of the angular velocity of the pulsar rotation, and the proportional constant J has an approximately universal value for each neutron star. If this vortex creep heating is quantitatively relevant against DM heating, this mechanism may cause a serious background to probe DM. The J parameter can be determined from the temperature observation of old neutron stars because the heating luminosity is balanced with the photon emission in the late time. We study the latest data of neutron star temperature observation and find that these data indeed give similar values of J, in favor of the assumption that these neutron stars are heated by the frictional motion of vortex lines. Besides, these values turn out to be consistent with the theoretical calculations of the vortex-nuclear interaction. Integarting all the results, we evaluate the vortex creep heating and conclude its significance against DM heating.
Venue: Seminar Room #359 (Main Venue) / via Zoom
Event Official Language: English
66 events