I am a Ph.D. student in Prof. Patrick Draper's theory group which is part of the UIUC High Energy Physics Group and the Illinois Center for Advanced Studies of the Universe, ICASU. I am interested in theoretical aspects of Quantum Field Theory such as instantons and anomalies. The study of these and other kinds of topological objects is of great relevance to continue expanding our knowledge and understanding of Quantum Field Theories.
I am also interested in non-perturbative aspects of Quantum Field Theory such as confinement. In general, I find the study of phases of gauge theories a very rich subject. Recent developments in our understanding of symmetries might be crucial to better understand phases of gauge theories. The connections between High Energy Theory, Condensed Matter Theory, and Statistical Mechanics, is an invitation to think about Quantum Field Theory as a general framework of physics which can be used to study different phenomena in nature.
Recently, I have studied a class of SU(N) chiral gauge theories first introduced by Eichten, Kang, and Koh, which feature matter in the anti-fundamental, two-index symmetric, and two-index antisymmetric representations. In particular, we computed a large set of 't Hooft anomalies induced by the fractional fluxes of the center symmetries of these theories. We also proposed an IR scenario that matches the zero-form 't Hooft anomalies for a pair of models within this catalog of chiral theories. These IR proposals also match the anomalies related to the center symmetries.
Currently, I am exploring ideas on the simulation of chiral theories on quantum computers, and on quantum-sensing-oriented detection for particle physics.
Publications
2. On asymptotically and anomaly-free SU(N) chiral gauge theories for arbitrarily large N. Kort Beck, Patrick Draper. arXiv:2609.21129, 2026.
1. Comment on "Spin correlations in elastic e+e− scattering in QED ". Kort Beck, Gabriel Jacobo. The European Physical Journal D, 77, 85, 2023. doi : 10.1140/epjd/s10053-023-00665-x . arXiv: 2209.13986, 2022.
Prof. Patrick Draper Theory Group, summer 2024.
For my Bachelor's thesis project, I worked on tensor dark matter, this is spin-one dark matter transforming under the (1,0)⊕(0,1) Lorentz group representation. In the proposed model, the spin-one dark matter particle is coupled to the Standard Model via a Higgs and Z portal. Using measurements from the 2017 XENON1T experiment, the model was constrained by computing the spin-independent cross section for WIMP–Xe scattering.
2025 Summer school in Quantitative Cell Biology
Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology & Department of Physics, UIUC
I worked on single molecule tracking inside living cells using the MINFLUX microscope at 2 nanometer resolution !
