In the context of a possible Higgs pole run at FCC-ee, I discuss the theoretical `price' of a large electron Yukawa modification. I start from an effective field theory viewpoint, considering the impact of renormalisation group effects on related observables and also examining assumptions on the broader UV flavour structure. I will then give an overview of the landscape of simplified models,...
We consider a new class of flavour models where the spurion breaking the flavour symmetries of the Standard Model is in a non-minimal irrep. Via multiple insertions of this spurion, flavour hierarchies accidentally arise from initial $\mathcal{O}(1)$ untuned entries. By relying on non-Abelian symmetries, the resulting pattern of flavour-violating operators at dim-6 SMEFT can be distinct from...
I will present a very brief overview of a nearly complete study of the vector and tensor decay constants of $B^*$, $B_s^*$, $D^*$, and $D_s^*$ mesons from fully relativistic $n_f = 2+1+1$ lattice QCD. We use multiple lattice spacings, with both heavy and physical light-quark masses. Ours will be not only the first lattice results for the $B^*$ and $B_s^*$ tensor decay constants, but also the...
Constraining the Higgs self-coupling at collider experiments allows us to better understand the shape and properties of the Higgs potential, which is a promising avenue into New Physics beyond the Standard Model (SM). The current experimental uncertainties on the Higgs self-coupling, parametrised by $\kappa_\lambda$, are of $\mathcal{O}(100\%)$, while Higgs couplings to the weak gauge bosons,...
Higher-derivative QFT’s are famously non-unitary, they suffer with growing modes and negative-norm states reflecting the classical Ostrogradsky instability. In this talk, I will present an interacting model whose renormalisation group flow admits a special line of solutions. On this special line we find preliminary evidence that the theory may be perturbatively unitary.
Cosmic superstrings are an interesting possible phenomenon in the early universe. Recently, there has been increased interest in the behaviour of these superstrings under a rolling modulus background which will cause the tension of the cosmic string to vary. We explore some preliminary results in the behaviour of cosmic string loops and perturbations in cosmic string networks under various...
I will discuss holographic spacelike and timelike entanglement entropy using the Ryu-Takayanagi prescription, for different-shaped entangling regions. I work with an infinite family of 10-dimensional Type IIB supergravity solutions, which are gravity duals to an infinite set of linear quiver theories which are 4-dimensional confining theories at low energy, but decompactify and flow to...
The AGT correspondence has lead to a rich interaction between 4d N=2 supersymmetric gauge theories and 2d non-rational conformal field theories. With Lotte Hollands, we hope to add another entry into this dictionary. Spectral networks are primarily objects that track the various BPS spectra of the 4d theory. In this talk, I will briefly discuss how spectral networks can be used to construct...
Jet vetoes are important tools that can be used to separate hard processes. A commonly used variable in which jets are identified and vetoed is the transverse-momentum of a jet. Experimentally, reconstructing small transverse momentum jets at forward rapidities is challenging, which motivates introducing a cut on a jets rapidity to reduce sensitivity to this region. Existing SCET leading-jet...
I will speak about the papers https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10062v3 and another two to appear shortly.
We construct and analyse infinite classes of regular supergravity backgrounds dual to four-dimensional SCFTs compactified on a circle
with a supersymmetry-preserving twist. These flows lead to three-dimensional gapped QFTs preserving four supercharges. The solutions arise in Type IIB, Type...
String islands are isolated points in the space of worldsheet conformal field theories that have reduced number of moduli, enjoy rank reduction and lead to consistent pure supergravity theories. Asymmetric orbifold constructions are powerful tools that enable us to access these points in the moduli space that are inaccessible to more standard string compactification techniques. In this talk, I...
Event shapes, such as Thrust and C-Parameter, are simple observables
that have been measured to high accuracy at electron-positron
colliders. Using Soft Collinear Effective Theory (SCET), an event shape
distribution can be factored into simpler pieces, including the soft
function which describes the corrections due to low energy QCD
radiation.
In this talk I will present the...
I will speak about the papers https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10062v3 and another two to appear shortly.
We construct and analyse infinite classes of regular supergravity backgrounds dual to four-dimensional SCFTs compactified on a circle
with a supersymmetry-preserving twist. These flows lead to three-dimensional gapped QFTs preserving four supercharges. The solutions arise in Type IIB, Type...
You can create a black hole bomb using a Kerr black hole by putting mirrors around it. This can happen because of a phenomenon called superradiance using which an incident wave can get reflected back with larger energy. The mirror then reflects it back and you can keep on extracting energy until the limit is reached. For a massive field, the mass itself acts as a natural barrier. Ultra light...
We investigate a minimal extension of the Leptogenesis framework that simultaneously explains the observed baryon asymmetry and dark matter (DM) abundance through the decay of a heavy Majorana neutrino. In this scenario, CP violation arises from complex Yukawa couplings, enabling the generation of asymmetries in both the Standard Model (SM) and DM sectors. We explore two regimes: (i) wash-in,...
Semileptonic Charm Decays on the Lattice
We investigate a minimal extension of the Leptogenesis framework that simultaneously explains the observed baryon asymmetry and dark matter (DM) abundance through the decay of a heavy Majorana neutrino. In this scenario, CP violation arises from complex Yukawa couplings, enabling the generation of asymmetries in both the Standard Model (SM) and DM sectors. We explore two regimes: (i) wash-in,...
In this talk, I will describe how supersymmetric localisation can be reinterpret and enhanced through the BV formalism. I will give a brief review of supersymmetric localisation, followed by a brief review of BRST quantisation. After this, I will explain how localisation can be reinterpret through the BRST framework. Then, I will explain how the BV formalism improves on the BRST formalism for...
The thermal deconfinement-confinement transition in SU(N) gauge theory is known to be first-order for N ≥ 3, but the dynamics of this transition are poorly understood. Lattice data indicates the presence of a small coefficient in the exponent of the nucleation rate which likely strongly alters the phase transition dynamics. In this talk, I discuss our study in arXiv:2508.10091 that provides...
The introduction of heavy right-handed neutrinos (RHNs) explains the smallness of neutrino masses and offers a mechanism for generating the baryon asymmetry of the universe via leptogenesis. While this is usually studied in thermal scenarios, a cosmological history beginning with inflation suggests a more natural alternative: the inflaton itself can decay into RHNs during rehating, this...
Most of the computational evidence for the Bose–Fermi duality of fundamental fields coupled to $U(N)$ Chern–Simons theories originates in the large-N calculations performed in the light-cone gauge. The evaluation of the thermal free energy on a finite-sized sphere is elusive in the light-cone gauge but more natural in another gauge, the ‘temporal’ gauge. We use it to evaluate the...
I will discuss SO(10)-inspired leptogenesis, a well known scenario of leptogenesis relying on conditions realised within SO(10) models and also beyond. I will first review results within current approximations and then I will show new results including flavour coupling effects that have not yet been considered so far. I will also confront predictions and constraints from SO(10)-inspired...
Recent experimental progress in meson spectroscopy has revealed numerous resonant states that do not fit the conventional quark model, leading to a plethora of theoretical and phenomenological models being proposed to explain their existence. However, to move beyond phenomenology and achieve a model-independent understanding, one must turn to QCD itself. In this talk, I will review the...
Non-linear scalar-tensor theories of modified gravity may explain observations attributed to dark matter and dark energy. Much is understood of their classical properties, but their quantum nature is relatively unexplored. We discuss a Green's function method for obtaining the leading order quantum corrections to the classical symmetron field in the vicinity of a spherically symmetric extended...
The asymptotic states of QCD are observed to be colour singlets. Among the possible colour singlets one can build there is the experimentally unconfirmed glueball, a bound state of gluons. Lattice simulations of $SU(3)$ Yang-Mills are able to probe several glueball channels and predict that the lightest states is heavy. With dynamical fermions the glueball becomes unstable and can mix with...
Axion strings are topological defects that arise when the Standard Model is extended to include a Peccei-Quinn symmetry, which is spontaneously broken in the early Universe. Upon that, the Universe is filled with a network of strings that decay, losing energy by emission of, among others, axions. The spectral index of the axion energy spectrum can be measured in the field theory simulations...
I will review basics of CMB physics and show that reflecting boundary conditions from the Big Bang are sufficient to explain the primordial power spectrum. If time permits I will try to explain how higher derivative quantum corrections to gravity can explain the scale invariance of the large wavelength modes in the CMB power spectrum.
The Fermilab measurement of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon $a_\mu$ at 127ppb is one of the most precise experimental tests of the Standard Model. However, the ultimate interpretation of this result is still unclear due to significant tensions in the theoretical predictions, particularly those of the hadronic vacuum polarisation (HVP) contributions $a_\mu^\text{HVP}$. The two methods...
The Variational Quantum Eigensolver algorithm (VQE) offers a potential near-term implementation of state preparation on a quantum computer. A significant barrier in the current hardware landscape is the occurence of noise, and full fault tolerance through quantum error correction is not currently feasible. Thus, it is important to consider possible quantum error mitigation techniques and their...
In this talk, I present a general and powerful strategy for solving integration-by-parts (IBP) identities, which take the form of multivariable linear homogeneous relations among Feynman integrals. Our diagonalisation approach transforms the IBP system into effectively single-variable recurrence relations. This diagonal structure exposes the analytic behaviour of the reduction and provides a...
The work of Sir David Cox and Halbert White is dedicated to the poverty of Maximum Likelihood fits under model misspecification, including poor data quality, as well as the necessary remedial, complex regularization. A literature on an alternative to Maximum Likelihood, Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD), has developed over the last seven decades. Recent contributions mathematically prove MMD’s...
Generalised Gibbs Ensembles (GGEs) appear in a wide range of contexts, from statistical physics to black hole thermodynamics and holography. They are constructed by inserting higher-spin conserved charges into a theory’s partition function. A 2D Conformal Field Theory partition function is a modular invariant, so it is natural to ask about the modular properties of the GGE. In some cases this...
Since the discovery of the accelerated expansion of the Universe at the end of the past century, we have obtained an abundance of precision measurements of our Universe, opening the gates for the era of precision cosmology.
However, with these new measurements and surveys came tensions and hints of new physics beyond that of the Standard Model of cosmology and particle physics.
I will...
The Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT) provides a powerful and systematic framework to search for physics beyond the Standard Model. In this talk, I will discuss the role of dimension-6 SMEFT operators in the Drell–Yan process and present preliminary results from a fit to current collider data.
In this talk I will present ongoing work towards a more precise and unified description of heavy-flavour decays in Sherpa, combining modern form-factor parameterisations with QED radiative corrections.
On the hadronic side, I am implementing Boyd-Grinstein-Lebed (BGL) form factors for a set of benchmark channels: heavy-to-light pseudoscalar and vector decays ($B \to \pi, K, \rho, K^\ast$),...
You can create a black hole bomb using a Kerr black hole by putting mirrors around it. This can happen because of a phenomenon called superradiance using which an incident wave can get reflected back with larger energy. The mirror then reflects it back and you can keep on extracting energy until the limit is reached. For a massive field, the mass itself acts as a natural barrier. Ultra light...
Motivated by recent results of DESI suggesting that a dynamical dark energy may render a better fit to experimental data in comparison to the Λ-CDM with a cosmological constant, we consider a two-field 4D effective model of quintessence. Inspired by string compactifications with a complex modulus, we study the system consisting of two real scalar fields kinetically coupled, giving rise to a...
We derive the differential distribution of semileptonic decays with respect to the perpendicular momentum component of the final state hadron. This approach is illustrated on the LHCb measurement of the $\bar{B}^0_s → D^+_s μ^- \bar{ν}$ decay distribution and uses data from the LHCb experiment in an independent phenomenological analysis for the first time.
A compelling quantum theory of gravity should provide a geometrically intuitive framework, continuing the tradition established by Einstein’s insight that geometry and physics are inseparable. String theory extends this legacy by replacing point-like structures with fundamentally extended objects, offering a richer geometric vocabulary and a natural setting in which causality and topology...
