Daily Papers

We study linear perturbations of the Maldacena-Milekhin-Popov (MMP) wormhole in the parity sector that pairs axial metric perturbations with polar gauge perturbations. It contains the axial gravitational mode and the electric field along the magnetic field lines. The lowest Landau level (LLL) of the charged fermions responds through its charge. The gauge components a_τ, a_ρ form a two-dimensional gauge field on the worldsheet of each field line, and the fermions respond with the exact Schwinger current. Lifted over the sphere, it gives the electric field the MMP screening mass m_S^2=αq^2, which is not small and survives in the mouth. In the throat the perturbation tilts the worldsheets, and the Casimir stress tensor acquires mixed components. Force balance then requires a current across the field lines, and charge conservation fixes an accompanying polarisation current, the counterpart of the Hall current of the polar sector. These currents close the Bianchi identities at first order in the fermionic backreaction α. The system reduces to three coupled master equations, given in closed form and matched to the fermion-free mouth. Consistency alone does not select the fermionic constitutive relation, but locality, covariance and the index theorem do. At α=0 the throat reduces to Poschl-Teller problems with masses l(l-1) and (l+1)(l+2) at m_S^2=0. At finite m_S^2 one mode is screened, one tends to the mass l^2+l+2, and one neutral charge-density wave stays exactly massless. The O(α) shifts of the massive normal frequencies are real and negative. The two parity sectors are isospectral only without fermions. The neutral channel sees an attractive region in each mouth, and a numerical solution coupled to the gravitational channel in the exact mouth potential finds no bound state. The sector has no growing mode for lge2 at this order.

We study two-point functions of chiral primary operators in N=4 Super Yang-Mills in the presence of a half-BPS surface defect. Such a defect preserves only the diagonal combination of transverse rotations and of a global U(1) R-symmetry, so that the correlator depends on one additional cross-ratio and splits into sectors of definite angular charge. We solve the superconformal Ward identities and construct the bulk and defect superconformal blocks in all sectors, including the charged ones, which have no analogue for defects preserving transverse rotations. The solution contains a holomorphic sector, which we fix non-perturbatively by mapping it to a chiral algebra correlator. We extend this map to defects breaking transverse rotations, where it requires a redefinition of the modes of the two-dimensional current algebra, and use it to fix the charged sectors as well. We then use the defect dispersion relation to reconstruct the full correlator of the dimension-two chiral primary at leading order at large N and strong coupling. In the charged sectors long multiplets are absent and the answer is conjecturally exact in both N and the coupling; expanding it at weak coupling, we find perfect agreement with known results. From these correlators we extract infinitely many new pieces of defect CFT data. Finally, we reproduce the strong-coupling answer by an independent Witten diagram bootstrap on the rotation-invariant locus.

The partition function p(n), which counts the number of partitions of a positive integer n, is widely studied. Here, we study partition functions p_S(n) that count partitions of n into distinct parts satisfying certain congruence conditions. A shifted partition identity is an identity of the form p_{S_1}(n-H) = p_{S_2}(n) for all n in some arithmetic progression. Several identities of this type have been discovered, including two infinite families found by Alladi. In this paper, we use the theory of modular functions to determine the necessary and sufficient conditions for such an identity to exist. In addition, for two specific cases, we extend Alladi's theorem to other arithmetic progressions.

There exist a number of well known multiplicative generating functions for series of Schur functions. Amongst these are some related to the dual Cauchy identity whose expansion coefficients are rather simple, and in some cases periodic in parameters specifying the Schur functions. More recently similar identities have been found involving expansions in terms of characters of the symplectic group. Here these results are extended and generalised to all classical Lie groups. This is done through the derivation of explicit recurrence relations for the expansion coefficients based on the action of the Weyl groups of both the symplectic and orthogonal groups. Copious results are tabulated in the form of explicit values of the expansion coefficients as functions of highest weight parameters. An alternative approach is then based on dual pairs of symplectic and/or orthogonal groups. A byproduct of this approach is that expansions in terms of spin orthogonal group characters can always be recovered from non-spin cases.

This thesis is divided into three parts. The first part deals with cylindric plane partitions. The second with lambda-determinants and the third with commutators in semi-circular systems. For more detailed abstract please see inside. Cylindric plane partitions may be thought of as a natural generalization of reverse plane partitions. A generating series for the enumeration of cylindric plane partitions was recently given by Borodin. The first result of section one is a new bijective proof of Borodin's identity which makes use of Fomin's growth diagram framework for generalized RSK correspondences. The second result is a (q,t)-analog of Borodin's identity which extends previous work by Okada in the reverse plane partition case. The third result is an explicit combinatorial interpretation of the Macdonald weight occurring in the (q,t)-analog using the non-intersecting lattice path model for cylindric plane partitions. Alternating sign matrices were discovered by Robbins and Rumsey whilst studying λ-determinants. In the second part of this thesis we prove a multi-parameter generalization of the λ-determinant, generalizing a recent result by di Francesco. Like the original λ-determinant, our formula exhibits the Laurent phenomenon. Semicircular systems were first introduced by Voiculescu as a part of his study of von Neumann algebras. In the third part of this thesis we study certain commutator subalgebras of the semicircular system. We find a projection matrix with an interesting self-similar structure. Making use of our projection formula we given an alternative, elementary proof that the semicircular system is a factor.

We establish a unified framework for understanding the results on the Weil quadratic form obtained by Yoshida (1992), Bombieri (2001, 2003), Connes--Consani (2023), and Connes--Consani--Moscovici (2025+) from the perspective of the screw function introduced in Suzuki (2023). An advantage of the approach via the screw function is that it provides a method to study the Weil quadratic form, which is originally defined in terms of distributions, by means of continuous functions. Based on this framework, we formulate a conjecture stating that a self-adjoint operator whose eigenvalues are the imaginary parts of the nontrivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function can be obtained as the limit, as a to infty, of self-adjoint operators arising from nonlocal realizations of the first-order differential operator on the finite interval [-a,a]. All these results are obtained without assuming the Riemann Hypothesis. This conjecture may be compared with the limit formula for the Riemann zeta function expressed in terms of zeta-regularized products proposed by Connes, Consani, and Moscovici, and it sheds new light on the spectral-theoretic interpretation of the nontrivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function.

We identify the free half shuffle algebra of Schützenberger (1958) with an algebra of real-valued functionals on paths, where the half shuffle emulates integration of a functional against another. We then provide two, to our knowledge, new identities in arity 3 involving its commutator (area), and show that these are sufficient to recover the Zinbiel and Tortkara identities of Dzhumadil'daev (2007). We use these identities to prove that any element of the free half shuffle algebra can be expressed as a polynomial over iterated areas. Moreover, we consider minimal sets of iterated integrals defined through the recursive application of the half shuffle on Hall trees. Leveraging the duality between this set of Hall integrals and classical Hall bases of the free Lie algebra, we prove using combinatorial arguments that any element of the free half shuffle algebra can be written uniquely as a polynomial over Hall integrals. We interpret this result as a structure theorem for streamed information, loosely analogous to the unique prime factorisation of integers, allowing to split any real valued function on streamed data into two parts: a first that extracts and packages the streamed information into recursively defined atomic objects (Hall integrals), and a second that evaluates a polynomial function in these objects without further reference to the original stream. The question of whether a similar result holds if Hall integrals are replaced by Hall areas is left as an open conjecture. Finally, we construct a canonical, but to our knowledge, new decomposition of the free half shuffle algebra as shuffle power series in the greatest letter of the original alphabet with coefficients in a sub-algebra freely generated by a new alphabet with an infinite number of letters. We use this construction to provide a second proof of our structure theorem.