MIT Center for Theoretical Physics — a Leinweber Institute Publications

We revisit the Hartle-Hawking wave function in AdS spacetime, where natural spatial slices are open and require an additional spacetime boundary. This leads to two constructions: a fully gravitational wave function, in which the boundary configuration is integrated over, and a partially frozen one, in which it is fixed, as in AdS/CFT. To illustrate the fully gravitational construction, we explicitly analyze it in AdS$_3$ Einstein gravity and AdS$_2$ Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity. We then evaluate the one-loop correction to the hyperbolic-ball partition function in $D$-dimensional AdS Einstein gravity, expected to give the leading contribution to the wave-function norm. We demonstrate that the fully gravitational hyperbolic ball partition function, where the boundary fluctuates, develops a nontrivial one-loop phase of $(\mp i)^{D+1}$, analogous to that of the sphere partition function in dS gravity. By contrast, the partially frozen partition function, where the boundary is fixed, remains real and positive. Motivated by this AdS comparison, we conversely investigate a partially frozen dS sphere partition function where the metric on an equator is fixed, finding that its one-loop phase cancels nontrivially. Our results suggest that the phase problem is controlled by whether the gravitational path integral is fully dynamical or partially frozen.

Tidal stripping is a key feature of the evolution of dark matter (DM) halos, and has major implications for the population of low-mass galaxies. In the case of ultralight DM, tidal stripping proceeds not only classically, at the tidal radius, but also via a process analogous to quantum tunneling by long-wavelength particles out of the potential of a subhalo. This modified tidal stripping behavior leads to tight constraints on the particle mass as a function of subhalo and host properties. As many models of ultralight DM predict several independent species, it is crucial to understand how these constraints can be generalized to multifield halos with different particle masses. However, numerical challenges make it difficult to directly study the tunneling process in all but the simplest multifield scenarios. We introduce a simplified approach based on semiclassical methods that entirely sidesteps the most difficult aspects of the numerical problem, and we apply this to the study of tunneling in multifield halos. Our results significantly clarify the physics of tidal stripping for ultralight DM halos even in the single-field case: we provide first-principles derivations of features of the tunneling rate previously suggested by empirical fits. We then evaluate stability bounds on two-field halos for the first time, for a wide range of density and particle mass ratios. We show that for particular parameter combinations, the stability bounds in the two-field case can be somewhat relaxed relative to the single-field case, but for much of the parameter space, the constraints become more stringent. We discuss the path towards probing realistic multifield ultralight DM halos.

Today, the observable cosmos exhibits a remarkable degree of isotropy and plausibly began in a nearly isotropic initial state. The properties of the Lorentzian Chern-Simons-Kodama (CSK) functional can provide an understanding of this initial state. In gravity with a positive cosmological constant, the Chern-Simons-Kodama (CSK) wavefunctional is an exact, chiral solution of the quantum gravitational constraints. We suggest that the normalizability and other issues with this functional, if interpreted as a proper state of quantum gravity, instead suggest an embedding into a larger quantum gravitational completion, and recast the CSK functional as a gravitational sphaleron with observationally desirable properties. By perturbing around the dominant de Sitter saddle of the wavefunctional with appropriate quantum gravitational boundary conditions, we find that for a closed universe the system is dynamically driven to spatial isotropy, while all anisotropic modes acquire positive quadratic curvature and are Gaussian-suppressed. The decay of this sphaleron therefore proceeds along an isotropic channel, providing an intrinsic quantum-gravitational mechanism for dynamical isotropization. This isotropization effect is robust under the inclusion of a slow-roll inflaton, and no analogous isotropic sphaleron exists for spatially flat or hyperbolic geometries. Taken together, these results recast the Lorentzian CSK functional as a chiral sphaleron that naturally prepares an approximately isotropic de Sitter background for inflation. Beyond this phenomenological study, we further suggest that the CSK functional can be understood as a boundary functional for a class of anomaly-free objects, including a complexified generalization of the Hartle-Hawking state.

In his 1976 paper “More about the massive Schwinger model”, Coleman introduced $1+1$-dimensional Quantum Electrodynamics coupled to two charged massive fermions. By applying Abelian bosonization, he elucidated much of the physics of this two-flavor Schwinger model, but he listed three puzzles at the end of his paper. We present new analytical and numerical calculations to solve Coleman’s three puzzles and thereby deepen our understanding of this model. These puzzles pertain to the theory with equal fermion masses at $θ= 0$ and at $θ= π$, as well as the size of isospin-breaking effects when the fermion masses are unequal. For the puzzle at $θ= π$, the solution is related to the structure of the zero-temperature phase diagram arXiv:2305.04437: for equal fermion masses $m$, the model exhibits spontaneous breaking of charge conjugation symmetry and absence of confinement for any value of the gauge coupling $g$, so that there is a smooth interpolation from weak to strong coupling. Using two-loop Renormalization Group and integrability methods, we show that the mass gap behaves as $\sim m e^{-0.111 g^2/m^2}$ in the strong coupling regime $m\ll g$. Our numerical results using the lattice Hamiltonian are in good agreement with this behavior. For the puzzle at $θ= 0$, the solution is related to a level crossing between two isosinglet particles with different discrete quantum numbers; we demonstrate the necessity of such a crossing by comparing integrability and weak coupling calculations, and we also exhibit the crossing numerically. Finally, we provide a new estimate for the size of isospin-breaking effects caused by different fermion masses at strong coupling.

Recent developments have shown that some semiclassical spacetimes cannot emerge from a traditional application of the rules of holography, prompting proposals for restoring their emergence with “observer rules”. In this paper, we propose a general semiclassical diagnostic of such failures of emergence, and of the extent to which observer rules can fix them. Our diagnostic is the presence of certain “evanescent” quantum extremal surfaces, which are distinguished by an upper bound on their area rather than their generalized entropy. In particular, the generalized entropy of an evanescent QES may be large: even though its area term must be small, its bulk entanglement term is unconstrained. This feature is explained by an operational distinction between classical and quantum connectivity in semiclassical gravity, or equivalently between the two summands of the generalized entropy.

We prove a singularity theorem in semiclassical gravity without assuming global hyperbolicity or the null energy/curvature condition; the former is replaced by the weaker causality conditions of stable causality and past reflectivity, and the latter is replaced as is standard by the Generalized Second Law. This establishes in particular that the standard models of evaporating black holes are singular – i.e. they are null geodesically incomplete.

The annihilation of self-interacting dark matter with long-range interactions can be significantly enhanced at low velocities through the Sommerfeld effect. At special points in parameter space, where near-zero-energy resonances exist in the spectrum of the theory, the standard calculation of this enhancement appears to violate unitarity. Recently, several approaches have been proposed to regulate this behavior, some introducing explicit ultraviolet (UV) scales and others not, raising the question of whether these prescriptions are consistent. In this paper, we compare these approaches and show that even in nominally cutoff-dependent methods, the regulated Sommerfeld-enhanced cross sections are independent of the UV regulator to a good approximation, and that when the unitarity-preserving corrections are large, the regulation schemes coincide to leading order. We use these insights to write down a regulator-independent prescription for unitarization applicable to multi-state systems, where the modified enhancement can be written solely in terms of the standard enhancement factor, the hard annihilation amplitude, and the $S$-matrix for scattering in the long-range potential.

The universality of the large momentum expansion allows computing parton distribution functions (PDFs) starting from any Euclidean correlator with appropriate large momentum Fourier Components. Here we consider current-current correlators which have been used in short-distance expansion to obtain moments of PDFs. The advantage of such correlators is that they have simple renormalization properties and do not have linear power divergences as in quasi-PDF. However, in lattice calculations, four-point functions are needed. Here we present an expansion formula with current-current correlators up to the next-to-leading order, and preliminary numerical calculations with four-point functions.

Jet production at the LHC is a powerful probe of QCD, making it ideal for precision tests and determinations of QCD parameters such as parton distribution functions and the strong coupling constant. To make the most of the abundant jet production data collected at the LHC, precise calculations are required. While state-of-the-art calculations reach next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) QCD accuracy, a critical assessment of the remaining uncertainties arising from non-perturbative effects and missing higher orders remains crucial for correctly interpreting comparisons between theory and data. Scale variation is nearly always used to determine effects from missing higher orders. In this article, we reassess this method in the context of inclusive jet production by performing NNLO QCD calculations supplemented by small-jet-radius resummation through next-to-next-to-leading-logarithmic accuracy (NNLL). We find that NNLL resummation can have an appreciable impact on the scale uncertainty for inclusive jet cross sections, and, for some scale choices, can lead to sizeable shifts of the central cross section. We conclude that scale variations in fixed-order and resummed calculations can drastically underestimate the impact of higher orders for commonly used jet radius parameters, and that missing higher-order estimates obtained via scale variations should be considered unreliable. Our findings add further evidence to the importance of going beyond scale variations in jet and jet substructure calculations.

We present an amplitude analysis of high-energy polarized photoproduction of $π^-Δ^{++}$ within a Regge exchange framework. A Regge amplitude model incorporating $π$, $ρ$, $b_1$, and $a_2$ trajectory exchanges is fit simultaneously to spin density matrix elements measured by the GlueX experiment at photon energies of $E_γ= 8.2$–$8.8$ GeV and differential cross section data from SLAC. By including SDME data, the fit constrains not only the magnitudes but also the relative phases of the helicity amplitudes. The results confirm the dominance of pion exchange at small momentum transfer, while natural parity exchanges become significant at larger $t$. We analytically continue the $s$-channel amplitude to the $t$-channel, taking care of the kinematical singularities, and isolate the dynamical residues at the meson poles. The extracted $πNΔ$ coupling constant is found to be consistent with the value obtained from the decay width of the $Δ(1232)$. For the $ρNΔ$, $b_1 NΔ$, and $a_2 NΔ$ vertices, first extractions of the relevant coupling constants are provided.

We find that heavy quark transport beyond leading logarithm at weak coupling is intrinsically non-Gaussian: the longitudinal momentum transfer distribution has asymmetric exponential tails that are crucial for equilibration dynamics. We show this by computing the leading-order momentum transfer kernel for relativistic heavy quarks in weakly coupled non-Abelian plasmas, matching perturbative momentum transfer on the thermal scale to hard-thermal-loop-resummed soft physics. This is the same structure previously found in strongly coupled holographic plasmas, showing that it is not peculiar to weak or strong coupling, conformality, or supersymmetry. We therefore expect that this is a robust feature that physical quark-gluon plasma should also exhibit.

Quantum error correction is widely believed to be essential for large-scale quantum computation, but the required qubit overhead remains a central challenge. Quantum low-density parity-check codes can substantially reduce this overhead through high-rate encodings, yet finite-size instances with practical logical error rates often achieve encoding rates only around or below $1/10$. Here, building on a recent ultra-high-rate construction by Kasai, we identify new structural conditions on the underlying affine permutation matrices that make encoding rates exceeding $1/2$ compatible with efficient implementation on reconfigurable neutral atom arrays. These conditions define a co-designed family of ultra-high-rate quantum codes that supports efficient syndrome extraction and atom rearrangement under realistic parallel control constraints. Using a hierarchical decoder with high accuracy and good throughput, we study the performance under a circuit-level noise model with $p=0.1\%$, achieving per-logical-per-round error rates of $1.3_{-0.9}^{+3.0} \times 10^{-13}$ with a $[[2304,1156,\leq 14]]$ code and $2.9_{-1.5}^{+3.1} \times 10^{-11}$ with a $[[1152,580,\leq 12]]$ code. These results approach the teraquop regime, highlighting the promise of this code family for practical ultra-high-rate quantum error correction.

Energy correlators offer a clean probe of quantum chromodynamics, serving as an ideal laboratory to rigorously investigate non-perturbative power corrections. The recent discovery that linear corrections exhibit a universal anomalous scaling points to a deep, underlying theoretical structure. We uncover the quantum field-theoretic origin of this phenomenon in the energy-energy correlator using light-ray operators. Through an explicit loop calculation, we derive the one-loop anomalous dimension, revealing that the dijet operator must be combined with a specific triple-jet component. This provides a first-principles framework that connects operator theory with high-precision collider phenomenology.

The 1D flux power spectrum ($P_{\mathrm{1D}}$) of the Ly$α$ forest provides an exceptionally high-resolution probe of structure formation down to small scales ($k\approx1-10~\text{$h~$Mpc$^{-1}$}$). These scales carry the imprints of massive neutrinos, warm dark matter, and the running of the primordial power spectrum spectral index. The effective field theory (EFT) is a promising perturbative approach to systematically and efficiently describe the Ly$α$ forest, but it faces challenges in its application to $P_{\mathrm{1D}}$, as many EFT parameters become degenerate when projected along the line of sight. In addition, this projection generates new stochastic terms from the integration over small-scale modes. In this work, we address these issues by compressing the EFT model space using the Fisher matrix formalism and linearizing the resulting compression directions, enabling analytic template marginalization and significantly reducing the computational cost of likelihood evaluation. We use hydrodynamical simulations to obtain a baseline estimate of EFT parameters, and use the DESI DR1 $P_{\mathrm{1D}}$ measurements to derive compression directions. We then marginalize over deviations from the baseline using these compression directions and forecast the constraining power of our formalism. We find that even in conservative scenarios where each data redshift bin requires its own set of EFT parameters, the cosmological constraints saturate with the linear bias, two leading-order 1D stochastic terms, and three principal combinations of the remaining EFT templates. In this case, our forecasted precision of the amplitude ($Δ^2_p$) and the logarithmic slope ($n_p$) of the linear matter power spectrum at the pivot scale ($k_p=0.7~\text{Mpc}^{-1}$) is $10\%$ and $2.0\%$, respectively, which is similar to emulator-based analyses that include observational data systematics.

We present a solvable Hamiltonian that realizes an exact lattice chiral $U(1)_V \times U(1)_A$ symmetry. Nielsen-Ninomiya-type no-go theorems are evaded by using lattice bosons rather than fermions. The continuum limit is a compact boson field theory with an axion-like coupling. The $U(1)_V$ symmetry shifts the scalar, while $U(1)_A$ acts on local operators associated with short axion strings and is transmuted into a higher-form symmetry in the continuum limit. We demonstrate the chiral anomaly by showing that the lattice theta angle is shifted by an axial rotation when $U(1)_V$ is gauged. Gauging either $U(1)_V$ or $U(1)_A$ leads to lattice non-invertible and 2-group symmetries, respectively, matching the continuum picture.

In particle physics, as in many areas of science, parameter inference relies on simulations to bridge the gap between theory and experiment. Recent developments in simulation-based inference have boosted the sensitivity of analyses; however, biases induced by simulation-data mismodeling can be difficult to control within standard inference pipelines. In this work, we propose a Template-Adapted Mixture Model to confront this problem in the context of signal fraction estimation: inferring the population proportion of signal in a mixed sample of signal and background, both of which follow arbitrarily complex distributions. We harness many biased simulations to perform data-driven estimates of each process distribution in the signal region, substantially reducing the bias on the signal fraction due to the domain shift between simulation and reality. We explore different methodological choices, including model selection, feature representation, and statistical method, and apply them to a Gaussian toy example and to a semi-realistic di-Higgs measurement. We find that the presented methods successfully leverage the biased simulations to provide estimates with well-calibrated uncertainties.

We introduce Sven (Singular Value dEsceNt), a new optimization algorithm for neural networks that exploits the natural decomposition of loss functions into a sum over individual data points, rather than reducing the full loss to a single scalar before computing a parameter update. Sven treats each data point’s residual as a separate condition to be satisfied simultaneously, using the Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse of the loss Jacobian to find the minimum-norm parameter update that best satisfies all conditions at once. In practice, this pseudoinverse is approximated via a truncated singular value decomposition, retaining only the $k$ most significant directions and incurring a computational overhead of only a factor of $k$ relative to stochastic gradient descent. This is in comparison to traditional natural gradient methods, which scale as the square of the number of parameters. We show that Sven can be understood as a natural gradient method generalized to the over-parametrized regime, recovering natural gradient descent in the under-parametrized limit. On regression tasks, Sven significantly outperforms standard first-order methods including Adam, converging faster and to a lower final loss, while remaining competitive with LBFGS at a fraction of the wall-time cost. We discuss the primary challenge to scaling, namely memory overhead, and propose mitigation strategies. Beyond standard machine learning benchmarks, we anticipate that Sven will find natural application in scientific computing settings where custom loss functions decompose into several conditions.

In this paper, we attempt to explore the landscape of two-dimensional conformal field theories (2d CFTs) by efficiently searching for numerical solutions to the modular bootstrap equation using machine-learning-style optimization. The torus partition function of a 2d CFT is fixed by the spectrum of its primary operators and its chiral algebra, which we take to be the Virasoro algebra with $c>1$. We translate the requirement that this partition function is modular invariant into a loss function, which we then minimize to identify possible primary spectra. Our approach involves two technical innovations that facilitate finding reliable candidate CFTs. The first is a strategy to estimate the uncertainty associated with truncating the spectrum to the lowest dimension operators. The second is the use of a new singular-value-based optimizer (Sven) that is more effective than gradient descent at navigating the hierarchical structure of the loss landscape. We numerically construct candidate truncated CFT partition functions with central charges between 1 and $\frac{8}{7}$, a range devoid of known examples, and argue that these candidates likely come from a continuous space of modular bootstrap solutions. We also provide evidence for a more stringent constraint on the spectral gap near $c = 1$ than the existing bound of $Δ_{\rm gap} \le \frac{c}{6} + \frac{1}{3}$.

In this paper, we study various conceptual and practical aspects of using maximum-entropy reweighting to upgrade parton-shower event samples based on higher-accuracy theoretical constraints. Our approach produces strictly positive per-event weights that improve parton-shower predictions while preserving full event-level exclusivity, allowing any observable to be computed on the reweighted sample without rebinning or regeneration. On the conceptual side, we explain how theoretical principles can help determine which constraints to use and which kinds of priors lead to efficient reweighting. On the practical side, we perform a proof-of-concept study with hemisphere observables in $e^+e^-\!\to$ hadrons, and show that even when the parton-shower prior is purposefully degraded by removing the non-singular parts of the QCD splitting functions, a small set of precision calculations can nevertheless restore the desired physical behavior. We use energy flow polynomials (EFPs) as a systematic basis to organize infrared- and collinear-safe constraints, and study how information transfers from constrained observables to unconstrained ones. We find rapid information saturation, where constraints from a compact set of EFP moments achieve broad improvements across observable space, including for standard hemisphere observables never used in training. Physics-motivated basis reductions guided by collinear power counting achieve comparable performance to complete bases, and mixed moments combining polynomial and logarithmic terms outperform pure alternatives. These results suggest a systematic approach to improving parton-shower event generators, where theoretical constraints of highest accuracy can be translated into full phase-space predictions of experimental relevance.

We present a lattice quantum chromodynamics calculation of the $x$-dependent isovector quark helicity parton distribution function (PDF) of the proton in the large momentum effective theory (LaMET) framework. Through operator product expansion (OPE) we also extract the $\tilde{d}_2$ moment of the twist-3 PDF $g_T(x)$ for the first time in the $\overline{\rm MS}$ scheme, which is proportional to the average color Lorentz force experienced by the quark in the proton. This calculation is performed on a lattice of spacing $a$ = 0.076 fm at physical quark masses. The quasi-PDF matrix elements are measured in proton states boosted to momenta $P_z=\{0, 0.25, 1.02, 1.53\}$ GeV. We first extract the lowest few helicity PDF moments from the renormalization-group (RG) invariant ratios of the matrix elements with OPE. Combined with the matrix elements relevant for $g_T(x)$, we obtain $\tilde{d}_2^{u-d}(2\ {\rm GeV})=0.0024(46)$ at next-to-leading order in $\overline{\rm MS}$. Then, the helicity quasi-PDF matrix elements are renormalized in the hybrid scheme with linear renormalon resummation and Fourier transformed to the $x$-space after an asymptotic extrapolation. The quasi-PDF is perturbatively matched to the $\overline{\rm MS}$ PDF with RG and threshold resummations at next-to-leading power and next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracies. After resummations, we determine the PDF in the region $x\in[0.25,0.75]$ with controlled systematic uncertainties. The end-point regions are then parameterized, combined with the LaMET prediction at moderate $x$, and fitted to the short-distance matrix elements in coordinate space.