We study the limit of quasilocal energy defined in [7] and [8] for a family of spacelike 2-surfaces approaching null infinity of an asymptotically flat spacetime. It is shown that Lorentzian symmetry is recovered and an energy-momentum 4-vector is obtained. In particular, the result is consistent with the Bondi-Sachs energy-momentum at a retarded time. The quasilocal mass in [7] and [8] is defined by minimizing quasilocal energy among admissible isometric embeddings and observers. The solvability of the Euler-Lagrange equation for this variational problem is also discussed in both the asymptotically flat and asymptotically null cases.

We use entangled multimode coherent states to produce entangled giant graviton states, in the context of gauge/gravity duality. We make a smeared distribution of the entangled multimode coherent states on the circle, or on the five-sphere, in the higher dimensional view. In gauge/gravity duality, we analyze the superposition of giant graviton states, and the entangled pairs of giant graviton states. We map a class of angular distribution functions to unitary operations on the pairs. We also use Young tableau states to construct cat states and qudit states. Various bipartite quantum states involving Young tableau states are analyzed, including micro-macro entangled states. Mixed states of Young tableau states are generated, by using ensemble mixing using angular distribution functions, and also by going through noisy quantum channels. We then produce mixed entangled pair of giant graviton states, by including interaction with the environment and using noisy quantum channels.

We compute the string production rate at the end of inflation, using the string spectrum obtained in [M. Li, W. Song, Y. Song, Quantizing strings in de Sitter space, JHEP 0704 (2007) 042, hep-th/0701258] in a near-de Sitter space. Our result shows that highly excited strings are hardly produced, thus the simple slow-roll inflation alone does not offer a cosmic string production mechanism.

Wave dynamics in topological materials has been widely studied recently. A striking feature is the existence of robust and chiral wave propagations that have potential applications in many fields. A common way to realize such wave patterns is to utilize Dirac points which carry topological indices and is supported by the symmetries of the media. In this work, we investigate these phenomena in photonic media. Starting with Maxwell's equations with a honeycomb material weight as well as the nonlinear Kerr effect, we first prove the existence of Dirac points in the dispersion surfaces of transverse electric and magnetic Maxwell operators under very general assumptions of the material weight. Our assumptions on the material weight are almost the minimal requirements to ensure the existence of Dirac points in a general hexagonal photonic crystal. We then derive the associated wave packet dynamics in the scenario where the honeycomb structure is weakly modulated. It turns out the reduced envelope equation is generally a two-dimensional nonlinear Dirac equation with a spatially varying mass. By studying the reduced envelope equation with a domain-wall-like mass term, we realize the subtle wave motions which are chiral and immune to local defects. The underlying mechanism is the existence of topologically protected linear line modes, also referred to as edge states. However, we show that these robust linear modes do not survive with nonlinearity. We demonstrate the existence of nonlinear line modes, which can propagate in the nonlinear media based on high-accuracy numerical computations. Moreover, we also report a new type of nonlinear modes which are localized in both directions.

We describe the applications of localization methods, in particular the functorial localization formula, in the proofs of several conjectures from string theory. Functorial localization formula pushes the computations on complicated moduli spaces to simple moduli spaces. It is a key technique in the proof of the general mirror formulas, the proof of the Hori-Vafa formulas for explicit expressions of basic hypergeometric series of homogeneous manifolds, the proof of the Mario-Vafa formula, its generalizations to two partition analogue. We will also discuss our development of the mathematical theory of topological vertex and simple localization proofs of the ELSV formula and Witten conjecture.