Workshop

Several tensions in exclusive semileptonic B decays have been found at the LHC yielding a global significance of more than 4 sigma. I will discuss the current experimental status and contrast explanations in terms of non-perturbative hadronic effects with solutions via high-scale New Physics. I will further present a selection of New Physics models that have been proposed to solve the anomalies and discuss their phenomenological impact and the consequences for direct searches.

The first direct observations of Gravitational Waves signals with ground based large interferometers are opening a new era in astronomy and astrophysics, a century after the development of the General Relativity theory predicting their existence. Great improvements and experience have been acquired in operating the first generation instruments fixing some important parameters for future generations of detectors aimed to a continuous observation of Gravitational Waves emitted by black holes, neutron stars and other enigmatic sources of these weak signals.

I will briefly review the current status of the standard cosmological model, based on recent data from the CMB, galaxy surveys (BAO, redshift space distortions), supernovae, weak lensing and direct H0 measurements. I will then provide a glimpse into what we can expect for the near and mid future from the upcoming surveys Euclid and SKA.

Several theories beyond the Standard Model, like the 2HDM, predict the existence of high mass Higgs particles. The excellent operation of the LHC during Run-II at an unprecedented centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV has enabled ATLAS to produce many new results in searches for such new particles. This talk will highlight chosen BSM results as well as describe the full story of the di-photon excess.

The Weak Gravity Conjecture (WGC), in its original form, says that given an abelian gauge theory there should be at least one charged particle whose charge is bigger than its mass in Planck units. This has surprisingly powerful implications for the possibility of large-field inflation. In this talk I will discuss some of the arguments linking the conjecture to cosmology, and present some evidence that strong versions of the conjecture are likely to be true.

Entanglement entropy is an interesting computable in both quantum information and more generally in condensed matter systems. In recent years gauge/gravity duality has been used to calculate entanglement entropy in a wide range of strongly coupled quantum field theories. This talk will review how entanglement entropy is calculated, what features of the QFT it captures, and what entanglement entropy might teach us about RG flows in quantum field theories.