The main advantage of effective theories in statistical mechanics is their simple (polynomial) structure that allows for an analytical treatment and suggests that large length-scales physics is insensitive to microscopic details. In general, however, their predictions are quantitatively wrong, except close to a critical point, where universality ensures that all systems behave in the same way. On the contrary, when there is no genuine critical point there is no guarantee that they are appropriate to describe a given system. This problem is becoming particularly pressing since recent advances have shown that a dynamical effective theory of supercooled liquids display a rich phenomenology, namely: i) dynamical crossover from power-law to exponential relaxation, ii) dynamical heterogeneities iii) decreasing dynamical correlation lengths. A partial answer to these problems comes from the existence of a number of academic models that are exactly described by the dynamical effective theory. Thus it can be viewed, at worst, as a toy model of supercooled liquids. For a given realistic system, instead, the problem cannot be decided a priori but one can devise a certain number of tests to determine whether the system under consideration should be described by the effective theory in the glass crossover region.

If the Physics Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) is decoupled at higher energies, the Standard Model as an effective field theory (SM EFT) is a pertinent framework for phenomenology. The BSM effects on observables are parametrized by the Wilson coefficients of dimension-6 operators, and bounds on their values can be placed from experimental measurements. Integrating out heavy particles at one-loop to obtain expressions for the Wilson coefficients is now also simplified by the use of our universal one-loop effective action. We show how the one-loop effective action obtained from the path integral Covariant Derivative Expansion method can be written in a universal closed form. This result has general applicability beyond the SM EFT and can be used for integrating out any UV theory to obtain a low-energy EFT. We illustrate the relationship of our results to the Standard Model EFT, using as an example the supersymmetric stop and sbottom squark Lagrangian and extracting from our universal expression the Wilson coefficients of dimension-six operators composed of SM fields.
We will also cover the alternative scenario where the New Physics is also directly produced at the LHC by analyzing a selection of interesting direct searches of BSM particles.

We compressed a 2D binary crystal into a glass in simulation. It exhibits a drastic structural change, in contrast to the conventional glass transition from a supercooled liquid where the structure changes little.
We identified the boundary between polycrystal and glass from various mechanical, structural, dynamic, and thermodynamic features. In addition, we identified Hall-Petch and inverse-Hall-Petch regimes in 2D polcrystals and three glass regimes. In the second part, we experimentally studied the relaxations of 2D bidispersed colloidal glasses near its surface during and after the vapor deposition. We observed the surface mobile layer at the single-particle level, and further discovered a middle layer which relaxes via large and anisotropic cooperative motions. It released free volumes towards the surface, leaving a more compact bulk glass. This novel relaxation mode in the middle layer cast light on the ultrastable glasses formed by vapor deposition.

Metabolism is the set of enzymatic reactions that cells use to generate energy and biomass. Interestingly, recent studies suggest that many metabolic enzymes assemble into large clusters, often in response to environmental conditions. Theoretically, we find that large-scale enzyme clusters, with no internal spatial ordering of enzymes, offer many of the same advantages as direct substrate channeling: accelerating intermediate processing, protecting intermediates from degradation/cross-reactions, and protecting the cell from toxic intermediates. The model predicts the separation and size of coclusters that maximize metabolic efficiency. For direct validation, we study a metabolic branch point in Escherichia coli and experimentally confirm the model predictions. Our studies establish a quantitative framework to understand coclustering-mediated metabolic channeling and its application to both efficiency improvement and metabolic regulation.

In this talk I will discuss the hierarchy problem from a known, but less mainstream direction. I will argue that the hints we have observed for high energy physics may in fact be a smokescreen, with the new physics responsible for these hints lying much closer to accessible energies. A new mechanism, the clockwork, will be proposed as an underlying explanation and connections to extra-dimensional scenarios will be sketched, alongside LHC phenomenology.

An analogy is traced between behavior of relativistic electrons in vacuum and electrons in narrow-gap semiconductors described by a two-band k.p model. Energy dispersion in the forbidden gap, statistical properties of electron gas, interband tunneling in electric field and energy dependence of the spin magnetic moment are used to illustrate the analogy. It is emphasized that it is much easier to observe semirelativistic effects in semiconductors than relativistic effects in vacuum.

Granular materials such as sand, powders, foams etc. are ubiquitous in our daily life, as well as in industrial and geotechnical applications. Although these disordered systems form stable structures if unperturbed, in practice they do relax because of the presence of unavoidable external influences such as tapping or shear. Often it is tacitly assumed that for granular systems this relaxation dynamics is similar to the one of thermal glass-formers, but in fact experimental difficulties have so far prevented to determine the dynamic properties of three dimensional granular systems on the particle level. This lack of experimental data, combined with the fact that in these systems the motion of the particles involves friction, makes it very challenging to come up with an accurate description of their relaxation dynamics. In this talk I will present results from X-ray tomography that allowed to determine the microscopic relaxation dynamics of hard granular ellipsoids that are subject to an oscillatory shear. This dynamics shows that on the particle level the dynamical behavior of granular systems are qualitatively different from the one of thermal glass-formers and instead more similar to the one of complex fluids.

After the 2016 13 TeV run, ATLAS and CMS have presented results targeting New Physics in a variety of final states and topologies. First, I will re-interpret the public datasets to study supersymmetric scenarios that go beyond the simplified topologies studied by the experimental collaborations, and present limits on natural SUSY. Then, I will present noteworthy (3 sigma) excesses buried in the CMS jets+MET searches, and present some simplified models that can provide a good fit. I will conclude by discussing their plausibility and which additional search channels could verify or reject these hypotheses.