Speaker: Dr. Andreas Karch(UT Austin) 

Host: Xueda Wen

Title: Making the Great Desert Bloom

Abstract: Quantum Field Theory is the language that unites particle physics, nuclear physics, condensed matter physics and mathematics. One particular interesting class of quantum field theories are "Chern-Simons" theories living in 2 spatial dimensions. They found a powerful role in mathematics decades ago and have been employed to describe the physics behind the quantum Hall effect. After reviewing some of these developments at the interface of particle and condensed matter physics, I will describe a recent application to the world of particle physics, where Chern-Simons matter theories may be the right language to describe the great desert between the weak scale and the Planck scale.

Bio: Andreas Karch is a professor of Physics at UT Austin, where he moved after being on the faculty for close to 20 years at the University of Washington in Seattle. He works on string theory and formal quantum field theory with an eye towards applications in other areas of physics. He did his undergraduate studies at the University of Wuerzburg in Germany, received an MA from UT Austin, his PhD from Humboldt University in Berlin, and did postdocs at MIT and Harvard. He is a fellow of the APS and a PI on the Simons Collaboration on Ultra Quantum Matter.