Quantum Institute: Visitor Schedule

The Quantum Lunch is regularly held on Thursdays in the Theoretical Division Conference Room, TA-3, Building 123, Room 121.

The organizing committee includes Malcolm Boshier (P-21), Adolfo del Campo (T-4 & CNLS), Michael Di Rosa (C-PCS), Armin Rahmanisisan (T-4 & CNLS), Changhyun Ryu (P-21) , Nikolai Sinitsyn (T-4), Rolando Somma (T-4), Christopher Ticknor (T-1), and Wojciech Zurek (T-4).

For more information, or to nominate a speaker, contact Adolfo del Campo.

To add your name to the Quantum Lunch email list, contact Ellie Vigil.

Tuesday Oct. 29 to Friday Nov.8, 2013
Minicourse

Speaker: Julian Sonner (MIT)

Technical Host: Adolfo del Campo

TOPIC: Introduction to holographic duality and some condensed matter applications

Abstract
This set of lectures will give a brief introduction to the ideas and techniques of the holographic correspondence, often referred to as 'AdS/CFT'. This correspondence relates certain quantum field theories in D dimensions to theories of gravity in D+1 dimensions. In this way we get a concrete framework in which gravity emerges from more fundamental degrees of freedom, which is exciting in its own right. Recently, however, a certain limit of this correspondence, in which a strongly coupled quantum field theory is related to a weakly coupled theory of gravity has been applied to questions which are of interest to certain parts of the condensed matter community. One can make use of the comparably simple gravity description to learn about strongly coupled quantum field theories, for example concerning their transport properties. These are infamously hard to extract from, say, Euclidean field theory techniques, such as quantum Monte Carlo. In contrast the holographic calculations in this regime are often surprisingly simply and analytically tractable. I will conclude my lecture series with a few examples of such techniques and will describe the main features of the calculations that are feasible for strongly coupled quantum critical points using the holographic duality.