Triangle Seminars

Abstract:
Cosmic strings arise as remnants of phase transitions in the early Universe, often related to theories of grand unification (GUTs). If such a phase transitions occurs at high energies, the resulting cosmic string network generates a sizable amount of gravitational waves. Most work so far has focused on the gravitational wave signal from topologically stable cosmic strings. In this talk I will introduce metastable cosmic strings, which are a generic consequence of many GUTs. I will discuss how this idea can be probed in various ongoing and upcoming gravitational wave experiments, from pulsar timing arrays to space- and ground-based interferometers. In the final part of my talk I will discuss a recent proposal on using the radio telescopes to probe this and other sources of ultra high frequency gravitational waves.
[please email a.held@imperial.ac.uk for zoom link or password]

Abstract:
Many integrable critical classical statistical mechanical models and the corresponding quantum spin chains possess a fractional-spin conserved current. These currents have been constructed by utilising quantum-group algebras, fermionic and parafermionic operators, and ideas from ``discrete holomorphicity''. I define them generally and naturally using a braided tensor category, a topological structure familiar from the study of knot invariants, anyons and conformal field theory. Such a current amounts to terminating a lattice topological defect, and I will touch on related work on such done with Aasen and Mong. I show how requiring a current be conserved yields simple constraints on the Boltzmann weights, and that all of the many models known to satisfy these constraints are integrable. This procedure therefore gives a linear construction for ``Baxterising'', i.e. building a solution of the Yang-Baxter equation out of topological data.
–––––––––– Part of the London Integrability Journal Club. New participants please register using the form at integrability-london.weebly.com.