Recent Searches for Exotic Physics at the BaBar/PEP-II B-factory

I present three recent results from searches for exotic physics at the BaBar/PEP-II B-factory. These results span many of the samples produced at the B-factory, including B mesons, tau leptons, and Upsilon(3S) mesons. We have searched for CPT-violation in B mixing and find no significant deviation from the no-violation hypothesis. We have also searched for lepton-flavor-violating decays of the tau using tau- -> omega l- and tau- -> l+ l- l+ and their charge conjugates. We find no evidence for these processes and set upper limits on their branching fractions. Finally, we have searched for a low-mass Higgs boson in the decay Upsilon(3S) -> gamma A0, where the Higgs decays invisibly. We find no evidence for such a decay and set upper limits across a range of possible Higgs masses.Comment: Parallel session talk at ICHEP08, Philadelphia, USA, July 2008. 4 pages, 5 Postscript figure

Tensor Networks with a Twist: Anyon-permuting domain walls and defects in PEPS

We study the realization of anyon-permuting symmetries of topological phases on the lattice using tensor networks. Working on the virtual level of a projected entangled pair state, we find matrix product operators (MPOs) that realize all unitary topological symmetries for the toric and color codes. These operators act as domain walls that enact the symmetry transformation on anyons as they cross. By considering open boundary conditions for these domain wall MPOs, we show how to introduce symmetry twists and defect lines into the state.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, 2 appendices, v2 published versio

In Our Shoes or the Protagonist’s? Knowledge, Justification, and Projection

Sackris and Beebe (2014) report the results of a series of studies that seem to show that there are cases in which many people are willing to attribute knowledge to a protagonist even when her belief is unjustified. These results provide some reason to conclude that the folk concept of knowledge does not treat justification as necessary for its deployment. In this paper, we report a series of results that can be seen as supporting this conclusion by going some way towards ruling out an alternative account of Sackris and Beebe’s results—the possibility that the knowledge attributions that they witnessed largely stem from protagonist projection, a phenomenon in language use and interpretation in which the speaker uses words that the relevant protagonist might use to describe her own situation and the listener interprets the speaker accordingly. With that said, we do caution the reader against drawing the conclusion too strongly, on the basis of results like those reported here and by Sackris and Beebe. There are alternative possibilities regarding what drives the observed knowledge attributions in cases of unjustified true belief that must be ruled out before, on the basis of such results, we can conclude with much confidence that the folk concept of knowledge does not treat justification as necessary for its deployment