Theory HEP Seminar

Gravity as a phase of matter

Gregoire Mathys

Cornell

I will discuss how generalized symmetries and their anomalies can be used to constrain low-energy effective field theories (EFTs). In particular, I will present EFTs enjoying biform symmetries, which are a slight variation of higher-form symmetries, and are defined by the presence of a conserved current that has the symmetries of a Young tableau with two columns of equal length. When these theories also have a topological biform current, its conservation law is anomalous, and this is sufficient to fix the current-current correlation function and infer the presence of a massless mode in the spectrum. This will allow me to discuss the symmetries of (linearized) gravity and its interpretation as a gapless phase arising from the structure of mixed anomalies of these symmetries.