PhD Defenses

PHYSICS PHD DISSERTATION DEFENSE: Divyanshu Murli

Date
Thu May 9th 2019, 3:00pm
Location
Varian 355

PhD Candidate: Divyanshu Murli
Research Advisor: Renata Kallosh

Date: Thursday, May 9, 2019
Time: 3:00PM
Location: Varian 355

Title: Topics in Supersymmetry and Supergravity: Applications to Cosmology and Scattering Amplitudes

Abstract: If supersymmetry exists in nature, it must be spontaneously broken at an energy scale higher than what we can currently probe. The first formulation of a theory with a spontaneously broken supersymmetry was formulated by Volkov and Akulov in the early 1970s, where the supersymmetry is nonlinearly realized. The bulk of my presentation will discuss a method of obtaining theories with nonlinearly realized (spontaneously broken) supersymmetry from the corresponding linear ones by taking certain particles to be infinitely massive. Theories of nonlinearly realized supersymmetry have recently been discovered to be useful for a consistent realization of de Sitter vacua and for embedding inflationary cosmology in supergravity.

If time permits, at the end I'll briefly discuss other work on showing that extended supergravities do not have U(1) anomalies from an amplitude perspective -- this is the final chapter of my thesis.