Archive of IAS Physics Group Meetings

Oct
23
2019

Physics Group Meeting

The Geroch Group
1:45pm|Bloomberg Hall Physics Library
We review some infinite dimensional symmetries that appear in dimensionally reduced classical general relativity. Reducing from d=4 to d=2 gives a two dimensional nonlinear sigma model with an infinite dimensional affine Kac-Moody symmetry called...
Oct
16
2019

Physics Group Meeting

Matrix Models and Minimal Liouville Gravity
1:45pm|Bloomberg Lecture Hall
I will review some old ideas about the duality between matrix models and Liouville theory coupled to a (p,q) minimal model. In this approach t'Hooft diagrams of the matrix model are thought of as a discretization of a 2d surface. Fine-tuning of the...
Oct
09
2019

Physics Group Meeting

Black Hole Images and the Photon Ring
Daniel Kapec
1:45pm|Bloomberg Hall Physics Library
The EHT Collaboration has recently published images of the supermassive black hole in M87. The images are dominated by a bright ring-like structure with an angular brightness asymmetry. While the diameter of this ring is resolved by the EHT, its...
Oct
02
2019

Physics Group Meeting

Hawking Radiation at Strong Coupling: A Case for Braneworld Black Holes
Jorge Santos
1:45pm|Bloomberg Hall Physics Library
Gauge/gravity duality relates certain strongly coupled CFTs with large effective central charge to semi-classical gravitational theories with AdS asymptotics. I will describe recent progress in understanding gravity duals for CFTs on non-trivial...
Sep
25
2019

Physics Group Meeting

Cardy Formula and AdS Black Holes
1:45pm|Bloomberg Hall Physics Library
I will discuss recent progress about the Cardy-like asymptotics of 4d supersymmetric index on S^3, also known as superconformal index. The main observation is that Bose-Fermi cancellation that trivializes the asymptotic expression of the index can...
Sep
18
2019

Physics Group Meeting

A brief review of some work on BPS states, wall-crossing, hyperkahler geometry, Hitchin systems, etc.
Greg Moore
1:45pm|Bloomberg Lecture Hall
This talk will give a brief overview focused on six papers written by D. Gaiotto, G. Moore, and A. Neitzke
loosely centered around the topics mentioned in the title. The papers are on the arXiv.
Background reading: Some short reviews are:
https:/...
Sep
11
2019

Physics Group Meeting

Introductory Group Meeting
1:45pm|Bloomberg Hall Physics Library
We will introduce ourselves and give a 2 minute description of what we are interested in at the moment.
The plan for future group meetings is to have some review talks, or topics for discussions. So please think about suggestions for things you...
Jun
12
2019

Physics Group Meeting

The Entanglement Wedge of an Evaporating Black Hole
1:45pm|Bloomberg Hall Physics Library
I will discuss recent work that studies the evolution of the von Neumann entropy of a holographic boundary system dual to an evaporating black hole in AdS. This entropy is computed via the Engelhardt-Wall prescription of extremizing the generalized...
Jun
05
2019

Physics Group Meeting

Geometric Extremization for Supersymmetric $AdS_3$ and $AdS_2$ Solutions
Jerome Gauntlett
1:45pm|Bloomberg Lecture Hall
We consider supersymmetric $AdS_3\times Y_7$ solutions of type IIB supergravity dual to N=(0,2) SCFTs in d=2, as well as $AdS_2\times Y_9$ solutions of D=11 supergravity dual to N=2 supersymmetric quantum mechanics, some of which arise as the near...
May
15
2019

Physics Group Meeting

Two Important Milestones in the History of the Universe: The Last Scattering Surface, the Black Body Photosphere of the Universe and Distortions of the CMB Spectrum
1:45pm|Bloomberg Lecture Hall
Our Universe is filled with Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation having an almost perfect black body spectrum with a temperature of To=2.7K. The number density of photons in our Universe exceeds the number density of electrons by a factor of...