In the past years, it has become increasingly clear that there exist nontrivial consistency conditions on symmetries in quantum gravity, that are invisible in classical gravity. The Swampland program aims at identifying such quantum gravity constraints and their implications for particle physics and cosmology, toward quantum gravity phenomenology. In this talk, I will review recent progress in this program, including my own works.

Continuous development of experiments in recent years has revealed a large number of experimental anomalies which the Standard Model cannot explain. It is statistically obvious that as the number of experiments increases, one encounters a new anomaly due to the statistical fluctuation. But interestingly, some of the anomalies have been cross-checked by different experiments. These would be hints for physics beyond the Standard model. In this talk, I will review the flavor anomalies (also known as lepton flavor universality violation), the muon g-2 anomaly, and recently measured the W boson mass anomaly. I will also discuss these implications for the new physics, and introduce several of our works.

The mathematical construction of non-trivial quantum field theory in four dimensions, known as the "Yang-Mills existence and mass gap problem", is a very important issue in mathematical sciences. There are many examples of rigorous quantum field theories in two dimensions, although the four dimensions have not yet been solved. In particular, two-dimensional conformal field theory, which is a quantum field theory with conformal symmetry, has good properties and can be formulated mathematically using algebraic structures formed by "products of a field and a field" (operator product expansion).

In this talk, this algebraic formulation (full vertex algebra) will be explained. Various construction methods and concrete examples (construction using codes, construction from quantum groups, and construction by deformation) will then be discussed.

All the talk here is mathematical, but I will try to speak in a way that is motivated by physics as much as possible throughout the talk. I hope to receive various comments from the viewpoints of other fields.

The widely acclaimed 1995/1996 papers by Ho, Perelson and others [1,2] demonstrated the important insights that come from mathematical modelling of virus infection kinetics within a person. But there are key dynamical differences between chronic and acute infections, namely whether the infection reaches or maintains some equilibrium or not. In this talk, I will introduce the equations used to describe a virus infection within a person. I will show some of the tricks used by mathematical modellers to extract important rate estimates from measurements in patients infected with chronic diseases, like HIV or Hepatitis C virus. I will explain why it is difficult to extract meaningful information from measurements in patients with an acute infection, like influenza or possibly COVID-19 [3]. I hope to hear from the audience if they have any thoughts about overcoming the issue to extract better rate information from limited data in patients with acute infections.

(This seminar is a joint seminar between Nonequilibrium working group and Biology study group)

Recent developments in statistical mechanics have revealed a tradeoff between heat current and dissipation [1,2]. In various situations, this current-dissipation tradeoff represents a relationship between thermal energy flow and entropy increase, similar to Joule’s law W=RI^2.

On the other hand, the coherence effect on the current-dissipation tradeoff has not been thoroughly analyzed. Here, we systematically analyze how coherence affects the current-dissipation tradeoff [3]. The results can be summarized in the following three rules: