Gravitational waves (GWs) at frequencies higher than the LIGO band can bring us completely new information about the universe. Besides being the most-interesting frequency region for looking at cosmological phenomena, they can also convey signatures of ultralight bosons through blackhole superradiance and light primordial blackholes (PBHs). I will introduce a new global initiative to study GW...
Asteroid-mass primordial black holes (PBHs) can explain the observed dark matter abundance while being consistent with the current indirect detection constraints. These PBHs can produce gamma-ray signals from Hawking radiation that are within the sensitivity of future measurements by the AMEGO and e-ASTROGAM experiments. PBHs which give rise to such observable gamma-ray signals have a cosmic...
Phase transitions are driven by thermal loop fluctuations, which modify background fields at leading order. This breaks the loop expansion and leads to large theoretical uncertainties in typical calculations, especially for gravitational wave predictions. I will give an overview of our present understanding of these uncertainties, and of the tools that have been developed to overcome them....
Stochastic gravitational wave backgrounds are expected to be anisotropic. While such anisotropies can be of astrophysical origin, a cosmological component of such anisotropies can carry rich information about primordial perturbations. Focusing on the case of a cosmological phase transition, I will talk about how such anisotropies can give us a powerful probe of primordial non-Gaussianities,...
The nanohertz-frequency band of gravitational waves should be awash with signals from supermassive black-hole binaries, as well as cosmological signatures of phase transitions, cosmic strings, and other relics of the early Universe. Pulsar-timing arrays (PTAs) like the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational waves (NANOGrav) and the International Pulsar Timing Array are poised...
Electroweak symmetric balls are macroscopic objects with electroweak symmetry restored inside. Such an object can arise in models where dark sectors contain monopole or non-topological soliton with a Higgs portal interaction to the Standard Model. It could be produced in the early universe via phase transition or parametric resonance, accounting for all dark matter. In a scenario where the...
Electroweak symmetry non-restoration up to high temperatures well above the electroweak scale has intriguing implications for (electroweak) baryogenesis and early universe thermal histories. In this talk, I will discuss such a possible fate of the electroweak symmetry in the early universe and a new approach to realize it, via an inert Higgs sector that couples to the Standard Model Higgs as...
In the last few years, the notion of symmetry has been enlarged to "generalized symmetry" or "higher-form symmetry" and these more generalized symmetries have played a critical role in deepening our understanding of QFT, notably IR phases of QFT. In this talk, I will discuss a various ways of coupling the axion-Maxwell theory to a topological field theory (TQFT). Contrary to a common wisdom, I...
