Grant: Subatomic Physics Envelope - Individual

The quantum field theory called the standard model has given us a remarkably successful understanding of elementary particle physics. String theory is a speculative model of physics at the smallest possible distance scales and a fascinating dynamical system which has been found to have solutions dual to some gauge field theories. The proposed research explores the structures of quantum field theory and string theory with the goal of improving the understanding of both subjects. It concentrates on the AdS/CFT duality between certain solutions of string theory and certain supersymmetric gauge field theories with the goal of obtaining a better understanding of the behaviour of gauge theory when its degrees of freedom are strongly coupled. Potential applications of this research range from understanding potential new structures of elementary particle physics within and beyond the standard model to examining the modes of behaviour of strongly correlated systems in condensed matter physics. A second research direction explores the role of topological features in quantum field theory in various environments and their possible role in determining the physical properties of the system. This work should have its most immediate applications in condensed matter physics where the understanding of materials such as topological insulators has seen rapid advances and where topological data has been used to characterize other exotic phases of matter. It also has potential applications in particle physics where various topological configurations of the Higgs condensate of the standard model pose intriguing questions. I am a member of the MOEDAL experimental collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN. The MOEDAL experiment is intended to look for monopoles produced by the collision of high energy proton and anti-proton beams. It can also look for other exotics, for example, R-baryons, the super-partners of baryons, should supersymmetry be relevant for physics at the TEV energy scale. The likelihood of finding monopoles is small, as there is no theoretical expectation for their existence at the electroweak scale. However, other exotics, such as Q-balls and false vacuum bubbles are harder to rule out theoretically and, in fact, given an extraordinary coincidence of mass scales observed in the standard model, could well exist. Gaining some understanding of why they are or are not there is important. Another role of topology in quantum field theory, in whose discovery we have recently participated, is in creating scenarios where exotic quantum entanglement of subsystems of the field theory can occur naturally. This idea is in its infancy, although I have preliminary results where such topologically driven entanglement can be used to implement simple quantum processes such as dense packing of classical information or teleportation of quantum information in an electronic system, with minimal decoherence.