Friday, 17th March 2023

Piet Mulders (Nikhef/VU), Badri Krishnan (RU), Erik Plauschinn (UU), Kevin Grosvenor (UL)

Piet Mulders (Nikhef/VU) – Chiral Entanglement and the symmetries of the SM
Abstract:
The standard model (SM) of particle physics is around for about 50 years and is highly successful with families of leptons and quarks coming in multiplets of at first sight ad-hoc electroweak and strong symmetry groups with an intriguing discrete chirality and triality structure. Is this symmetry accidental or unavoidable. Chirality may play a special role being relevant in both space-time and internal symmetries, with chirality maximally broken in the electroweak sector and chiral symmetry restoration in the strong sector linked to the confining triality structure.
Entanglement in a tripartite chiral qubit Hilbert space allows for different classes of maximally entangled quantum states identified as the leptons and quarks for electroweak and strong sectors, emerging with their respective symmetry structures. Chiral entanglement could be an emerging principle in the SM that provides guidance for its  extension or, more basic, that can help in understanding features within the SM such as mass patterns, universality breaking, partonic structure with distribution and fragmentation phenomena for confined systems including details like the role of gluonic Wilson lines

Badri Krishnan (RU) – Exploring black holes with gravitational waves
Abstract:
The LIGO and Virgo observatories have now observed gravitational wave signals from close to 100 binary black hole merger events. These observations potentially enable us now to confront theoretical predictions of general relativity with observational data. Some of the most remarkable predictions of general relativity are concerned with black holes. These include: the black hole area increase law, properties of black hole horizons, uniqueness theorem and black hole quasi-normal modes. In this talk, I will review recent results in this direction, and the prospects with future, more sensitive detectors.

Erik Plauschinn (UU) – Compactifications of string theory — from generic features to conjectures
Abstract:
String theory is an example for a theory of quantum gravity including gauge interactions. It is consistent only in ten space-time dimensions, but can be connected to four-dimensional physics through compactification. Compactifications of string theory lead to a plenitude of effective theories in lower dimensions, whose general properties may suggest generic features of quantum gravity. In this talk I briefly review some aspects of string compactifications, I describe observations about the resulting theories, and I discuss corresponding conjectures about quantum gravity.

Kevin Grosvenor (UL) – The AdS/CFT Correspondence: A Window into Strongly-Correlated Systems
Abstract:
The AdS/CFT Correspondence, also known as the holographic principle, is a powerful theoretical framework that relates two seemingly disparate fields: string theory in Anti-de Sitter (AdS) space and conformal field theory (CFT) in one less dimension. This correspondence is an example of a weak/strong duality which gives us a window into the world of strongly-coupled quantum field theories (QFTs) describing strongly-correlated systems by passing to a weakly-coupled gravitational system. We will provide an overview of the AdS/CFT correspondence and we will apply this duality to a classic example of strongly-correlated electrons, the strange metal, which is a class of material that exhibits unusual thermoelectric transport properties. We will demonstrate how we can reproduce a number of the key measured transport properties of the strange metal by placing it on an explicit lattice and numerically solving the dual gravitational system.

CWI/Nikhef, room Z011

Science Park in Amsterdam

The schedule is as follows (titles and abstract below):

10:00 Coffee/tea
10:30 Piet Mulders (Nikhef/VU)
11:15 Badri Krishnan (RU) –Nikhef colloquium–
12:15 Lunch
14:00 Erik Plauschinn (UU)
14:45 Kevin Grosvenor (UL)
15:30 Borrel/drinks

For questions or suggestions, please contact one of the organizers:

Wouter Waalewijn (NIKHEF)
tel: +31 (0)20 5255773
e-mail: wouterw@nikhef.nl

Marieke Postma (Nikhef)
tel.: +31 (0)20 5925128
e-mail: mpostma@nikhef.nl

Timothy Budd (RU)
e-mail: T.Budd@science.ru.nl