Date: August 6
Time: 17:30 IST (UTC + 5:30)
Speaker: Timm Wrase (Lehigh University)
Title: The (A)dS swampland conjectures
Abstract: I will review recent swampland conjectures that constrain the existence of dS and AdS solutions in string theory. Then I will discuss potential counterexamples and refinements of these conjectures. While the dS swampland conjectures and their counterexamples are more relevant for our own universe, they are fairly difficult to improve on. However, it seems possible to reach a consensus in the AdS case. While I will focus on the gravity side of such AdS solutions, there are important implications for the AdS/CFT duality and it is in principle possible to resolve the problem from the CFT side.
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Date: August 13
Time: 17:30 IST (UTC + 5:30)
Speaker: Sukrut Mondkar (IIT Madras)
Title: Hydrodynamic attractor in a toy model for the QGP
Abstract: The phenomenon of hydrodynamic attractors provides theoretical insights for understanding the applicability of hydrodynamics in far from equilibrium conditions and has been influential in the study of phenomenology of QGP produced in heavy ion collisions. However, in the latter case, we need to consider both weakly interacting and strongly interacting degrees of freedom. In our work, we study how hydrodynamic attractors can also emerge in such a complex system involving the flow of hybrid degrees of freedom. To this end, we use the hybrid two-fluid model developed by Kurkela et al. to couple two viscous fluids, one strongly interacting and other weakly interacting. We find that this hybrid system exhibits a two-dimensional attractor surface in four-dimensional phase space of hydrodynamic variables. One of the key findings of our work is that the energy distribution between the two systems evolves at early times quite similar to the bottom-up thermalization scenario of Baier et al. while we gain new insights into how initial conditions affect hydrodynamization of the composite system. The latter might have implications for understanding the significant differences between large and small systems in nuclear collisions.
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Date: August 20
Time: 09:30 IST (UTC + 5:30)
Speaker: Keshav Dasgupta (McGill University)
Title: How hard is it to get a de-Sitter space in string theory
Abstract: In this talk I will summarize why it is so hard to get a de-Sitter space in string theory. I will also discuss a possible way out of this and provide a (hopefully) concrete realization of 4d de Sitter.
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Date: August 27
Time: 17:30 IST (UTC + 5:30)
Speaker: Arnab Kundu (SINP, Kolkata)
Title: A Chaotic Journey in AdS
Abstract: The notion of ergodicity in the quantum world is state-dependent. In this talk, we will briefly review and summarize recent results, as well as ongoing works, on the interplay of ergodicity and thermal nature of a class of extremal states in CFT, using the standard Holographic description. The discussion will primarily focus on (bulk) three-dimensions, but we will also discuss qualitative aspects in higher dimensions. We will attempt to make the talk self-contained, with minimal background knowledge.
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