A rich physics program is beginning to be explored in the far-forward region at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). FASER (ForwArd Search ExpeRiment) was installed in 2020 and is designed to study the interactions of high energy neutrinos and to provide world-leading sensitivity to the discovery of new light and weakly coupled particles. It is located 480 m from the ATLAS interaction point on the collision axis line-of-sight and is shielded by 100 m of concrete and rock, creating an extremely low-background environment. This seminar will focus on the latest neutrino measurement and BSM search results from the FASER experiment using data collected in 2022 and 2023, and the future of FASER and the proposed Forward Physics Facility (FPF).

For more than a century, superconductors have been the paradigmatic "quantum material", providing fundamental discoveries like gauge symmetry breaking and impacting technologies from medical imaging to quantum computing. Despite their central importance, characterizing new types of superconductors is still a difficult task: all superconductors have zero resistance, but their more subtle properties related to entanglement and topology are hard to probe experimentally. I will introduce chiral topological superconductors in two dimensions - a type of superconductivity with a "knot" in the superconducting wave function. These superconductors can host Majorana edge modes and bound states in their vortex cores, but finding a real-life example has proven challenging. I will show how we use ultrasound - deforming a crystalline lattice in a manner not unlike how gravity waves deform spacetime - to test whether a particular superconductor has the "right ingredients" to be a 2D topological superconductor. I will present the progress we have made thus far - ruling out many proposed candidate materials and discovering an unexpected new type of superconductivity along the way - and give a prognosis for what I think the most promising route is for discovering a 2D topological superconductor.

I will introduce a framework based on Symmetry Topological Field Theory (SymTFT) for characterizing and classifying both gapped and gapless phases, as well as phase transitions in quantum systems with global categorical symmetries. This characterization will be expressed in terms of sets of condensed, confined, and deconfined generalized symmetry charges, evoking concepts familiar from superconductivity. Furthermore, I will demonstrate how the SymTFT data can be transformed into an ultraviolet (UV) lattice model—such as an anyon chain model in 1+1 dimensions or a fusion surface model in 2+1 dimensions—that realizes these phases and transitions in the infrared (IR) limit.