Grant: Subatomic Physics Envelope - Individual

The main thrust of this proposal is to further our work on the  infrared structure of quantum electrodynamics and perturbative quantum gravity. Our central result that the soft photons and gravitons that are produced and which fly away undetected from  any collision of electrically or gravitationally charged particles aare highly correlated with the particles left behind has already has some impact and we are presently working on trying to further understand the implications. One important medium term project is to understand in more detail how it is related to the asymptotic symmetries which Hawking Perry and Strominger proposed as an approach to the black hole information paradox and which are also thought to be intimately tied to infrared issues. Another medium term goal is to understand whether the strong quantum correlations that we have found could be tested by any viable experiment.  This could distinguish between different approaches to the infrared problem in quantum electrodynamics.   I have been involved in a European collaboration called "STRONGBIDS" which studies the influence of defects and boundaries in quantum field theories. My participation so far has been limited to speaking at their online conferences and I will go to their in person workshop in Stockholm next year. Some of my activity in this collaboration would need to be supported by my NSERC grant and I propose to involve graduate students directly in the research. The  is a natural extension of my work on graphene--like defect and boundary conformal field theories where I have some good preliminary results. I feel that I have a leadership role in this effort and that it gives my graduate students opportunities for postdoctoral fellowships. We continue work on string theory holography which was the centrepiece of my last few NSERC grants.  The emphasis  has shifted from attempts to use holographic duality to study strongly coupled quantum field theories to its use in understanding phenomena in quantum gravity. We are using our expertise on unitary random matrix theory to seek new holographic models of noncritical string theory. The goal is to better understand  non-perturbative  string theory and non-perturbative aspects of quantum gravity.  With Professors M.Paranjape of the University of Montreal and B.Williams of the UBC Mathematics department I have initiated a study Skyrmions which would arise from discrete torsion in homotopy groups. These objects would have the exotic properties and they are potentially relevant to beyond the standard model particle physics or to some condensed matter systems. I am a member of the MOEDAL experimental collaboration at CERN.  I need to emphasize that none of the research activities that I have described above would be supported by the MOEDAL grant. I participate in MEODAL because I find the inexpensive, simple and model independent experiment an attractive idea where I have  had a significant hand in the theoretical work.