Within the AdS/CFT correspondence, the entanglement properties of the CFT are related to wormholes in the dual gravity theory. This gives rise to questions about the factorisation properties of the Hilbert spaces on both sides of the correspondence.  We review these issues and show how the Berry phase, a geometrical phase encoding information about topology, […]

The Lambda-cold-dark-matter (LCDM) model has established itself as a fantastic (yet parametric)  concordance model able to adjust a wide variety of cosmological observables — CMB, BBN, Large Scale Structure (LSS) […]

I will discuss string theory compactifications where a large number of moduli is stabilized by fluxes. I will first present a conjecture which rules out the stabilization of all complex-structure moduli […]

We discuss flux compactifications of Type IIA supergravity on G2 spaces with smeared O2/O6-planes down to three dimensions. We start by presenting the setup of allowed fluxes, the internal geometry, the equations of motion and after compactification we achieve N=1 AdS3 vacua with scale that can be parametrically decoupled from the KK modes. The solutions […]

Modulations of X-ray spectra from extragalactic sources might provide a signature of photons converting into axion-like particles (ALPs) when traversing a region with a large-scale magnetic field. A crucial unknown in these searches is the structure of the magnetic field considered. In this talk I discuss the impact of realistic models of the magnetic field on […]

In 1976, S. Weinberg and his student, E. Gildener (GW), proposed multi-Higgs models of electroweak symmetry breaking which are clas- sically scale-invariant. If this scale invariance is spontaneously broken, the Higgs boson is the resulting massless dilaton and, of all the model’s scalars, its couplings to gauge bosons and fermions are exactly as in the […]