EFTs Across The Universe

Created in January 22, 2025

2025   ·   Workshop,   EFT   ·   Workshop

The titlepage of the opening talk for our workshop: EFTs Across The Universe

Recently, we hosted the workshop EFTs Across The Universe at the Instituto de Fisica. It took Marcos García and me more than six months to put this event together but in the end all the hard work really paid off. We had five guest speakers that have gotten a challenging task from us: Within three to four lectures, please give us an introduction into your research topic and also tell us about your current research work!

The idea behind this format was to make this event half workshop and half school, so that everyone, from undergrad students to senior faculty, can learn and take something now home. I have had never seen this kind of format before the event organized by my colleagues Aurore Curtoy and Mariana Vargas Magaña in December 2023. And what is there to say, it works really well!

For our event we invited five speakers that all work on topics related to Effective Field Theories, but we wanted to make sure that none of these lines of research were represented so far at the Institute. For our lectures we were able to invite Mikhail Ivanov (MIT), Soubhik Kumar (New York), Alexander Edison (Northwestern), Laura Reina (FSU), and Sebastian Jaskiewicz (Bern).

  • Mikhail Ivanov from MIT had to cancel his trip to Mexico last minute, but was able to give his lectures via Zoom. He gave lectures on an effective field theory approach to Large Scale Structure Formation.

  • Soubjik Kumar from the University of New York talked about the novel Cosmological Collider program. Here scattering amplitude techniques are employed to study the dynamics of super massive particles during inflation.

  • Alexander Edison from the University of Northwestern presented an effective field theory approach for the computation of observables for gravitational waves.

  • Laura Reina from the Florida State University told us about the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT) and how it allows to to constrain New Physics at the LHC.

  • Sebastian Jaskiewicz from the University of Bern gave us an introduction to Soft-Collinear Effective Field Theort (SCET) with a teaser of how the factorization of infrared physics at subleading power works.

As the workshop was held during the running semester we were initially concerned about the number of participants. However, it turned out that this was not necessary. Over the week, we had 95 participants that enjoyed the lectures and discussions with our invited speakers.