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I will review various developments in mimetic gravity including cosmological models, non-singular black holes, and dark matter.

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Heisenberg’s principle of quantum uncertainty implies that the quantum vacuum is not empty, but a “seething sea” of virtual particles.  This simple observation has profound implications for a wide range of physical systems, from the vacuum of quantum electrodynamics to the materialization of light using high-power lasers, to Hawking radiation from black holes, to particle production from the vacuum in the earliest moments of the universe.  I will explain how to pull virtual particles from the quantum vacuum, and the profound implications of the simple idea of the seething sea of quantum uncertainty.

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Let's delve into the transformative role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in physics — it's not just about automating tasks, but also about gaining new insights and pushing the boundaries of our research. I will introduce the fundamentals of AI and machine learning, review their applications in physics, showcase popular AI tools suitable for research, and discuss challenges related to the interpretability and ethics of AI.

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In my talk I will first introduce the basic principles and conjectures of the swampland approach to quantum gravity. Then I will concentrate on the problem of dark energy and dark matter, and how swampland relations possibly provide a clue to the understanding of these fundamental problems. I will discuss some possible interrelation between dark energy, dark matter and also about early inflation in the universe.

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In this lecture, we delve into the fascinating world of quark flavour physics. Central to this field is the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) matrix, which describes the mixing and transitions between different quark flavours under the weak interaction. This lecture will take you on a journey through the complex landscape of quark flavors, exploring how these fundamental particles transform and mix in ways that challenge our understanding of the universe. By decoding the CKM matrix, we will uncover the underlying principles governing quark transitions, delve into the enigma of CP violation, and examine how these phenomena might hint at physics beyond the Standard Model.

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We study the decay of the false vacuum in the regime where the quantum field theory analysis is not valid, since gravitational effects become important. This happens when the height of the barrier separating the false and the true vacuum is large, and it has implications for the instability of de Sitter, Minkowski and anti-de Sitter vacua. We carry out the calculations for a scalar field with a potential coupled to gravity, and work within the thin-wall approximation, where the bubble wall is thin compared to the size of the bubble. We show that the false de Sitter vacuum is unstable, independently of the height of the potential and the relative depth of the true vacuum compared to the false vacuum. The false Minkowski and anti-de Sitter vacua can be stable despite the existence of a lower energy true vacuum. However, when the relative depth of the true and false vacua exceeds a critical value, which depends on the potential of the false vacuum and the height of the barrier, then the false Minkowski and anti-de Sitter vacua become unstable. We calculate the probability for the decay of the false de Sitter, Minkowski and anti-de Sitter vacua, as a function of the parameters characterizing the field potential.

What is common among a magnet, a halibut, a rack of laundry, your heart on the left of your body, and the Higgs boson? The concept of spontaneous symmetry breaking is fundamental to understand many natural phenomena. I'll describe the basic concept and its applications, and see how far it can go. In particular, the original concepts from Anderson, Nambu, Goldstone, and Higgs do not quite work in many systems that include a magnet on your fridge. I generalize the concept so that it is applicable to all known natural phenomena around us, and give a few examples of new ideas based on the generalization.

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Dark Matter is one of the biggest puzzles in science today. Astronomical observations tell us Dark Matter makes up 26% of our universe and experiences the gravitational force, yet we still know very little beyond this. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN has been built to try and understand some of the long-standing questions in science. Over 10,000 scientists come together from around the world to run mankind's biggest experiment in history, discovering the Higgs boson in 2012 that explains the origins of mass, and continuing to search for new, exotic particles that could explain Dark Matter. I will introduce the LHC and the largest of the four main detectors, ATLAS. I'll show you how and why we search for a rich array of new particles predicted by Supersymmetry and the latest results from these searches. As the LHC program moves into its final stage, what further secrets of the universe will we uncover?

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Fluid turbulence is a major unsolved problem of physics exhibiting an emergent complex structure from simple rules. We will briefly review the problem and discuss three avenues  towards its solution: field theory, holography and deep learning.

Thanks to the rapid progress in observational cosmology, we have begun to understand the very early stages of the Universe, specifically primordial inflation. However our knowledge is still far from complete. I will review what inflation is and what we currently know about it. Then I will discuss some recent topics that may improve our understanding of the early Universe, including primordial black hole formation and its implications for the blossoming field of gravitational wave cosmology.

Axions, the famous hypothetical particle that explains the absence of CP violation in QCD, was already though of in the 70ies. Yet only in the past decade the hunt for this and similar particles took up pace, which huge advancements in the recent years. The reason behind the growing interest is the understanding that axions and axion-like particles can contribute to the dark matter content of the universe. In fact, pseudo-scalar particles are a natural prediction of many extensions of the Standard model and even possibly explain the muon (g-2) anomaly. Considering the general case of pseudo-scalar particles, a huge parameter space in mass and coupling to SM particles opens up, requiring a variety of experimental approaches to hunt for these particles. This talk will briefly introduce the phenomenology of axions and axion-like particles and discuss a variety of experimental approaches and their challenges to search for these particles over more than 17 orders of magnitude in mass. 

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For centuries there was a deep belief that the fundamental laws of nature are left-right symmetric. In 1956, this belief came crashing down, with the discovery that the weak force is actually completely asymmetric - only left handed particles interact with each other. This profound result is at the core of the Standard Model, today’s theory of all relevant elementary particle interactions, in perfect accord with all observations except for one key prediction that neutrino, the most elusive and most unique of all particles, has zero mass. 

What if deep down this fundamental symmetry was only hidden in the subatomic world? This premise forms the foundation of the so-called Left-Right Symmetric Theory, which from the outset led to the prediction of nonvanishing neutrino mass, decades before its experimental confirmation - and to the seesaw mechanism behind its incredible smallness. It was shown in recent years that this theory is completely self-contained and predictive when it comes to neutrino mass, in complete analogy with the Standard Model for the electron and its fellow particles. Crucially, the Left-Right Symmetric  Theory leads to a plethora of new phenomena, now under investigation at the Large Hadron Collider. If validated, these discoveries will change  the way we perceive the symmetry of nature.

In the coming decade, a wealth of new cosmological data will be obtained through a variety of observational programs. 

This talk will provide an overview of several ongoing and planned initiatives, including multiple galaxy surveys as well as CMB experiments. 

I will also explore the potential of this data to address key questions in contemporary cosmology.

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