Sommerfeld Theory Colloquium (ASC)

This lecture is aimed at a rather broad audience including under- graduates. It will discuss scaling arguments, what they can achieve (Kolmogorov’s -5/3 law, etc.) and what they miss (fractals, Etc).

The decay of a false vacuum of unbroken B-L, the difference of baryon and lepton number, is an intriguing and testable mechanism to gen- erate the initial conditions of the hot early universe. If B-L is broken at the grand unification scale, the false vacuum phase yields hybrid inflation, ending in tachyonic preheating. The dynamics of the B-L breaking Higgs field and thermal processes produce an...

If systems characterized by slow (algebraic) relaxation are prepared in an out-of-equilibrium initial state, one can observe a "physical aging regime" in the ensuing approach to equilibrium that is governed by broken time translation invariance and non-trivial, often universal scaling laws. Dynamical systems near a critical point constitute prototypical and now well-understood examples. Indeed, me...

In the next few years new data from ground and space will push the limit of cosmological observations to new frontiers. Combining CMB, weak lensing, redshift clustering and supernovae data, we will be able to constrain the properties of dark energy and its interactions from the background to the non-linear level. In this talk I discuss these methods and the future expected constraints on dark ener...

In Regensburg there exists a large Lattice-QCD group (SFB/TR-55) working in many fields, ranging from the development of energy efficient super-computers to specialized Lattice studies of SU(N) gauge theories with N>3 for matching to AdS/CFT predictions. The bulk of the work is focused on hadron phenomenology [generalized parton distributions (GPDs), distribution amplitudes (DAs), transverse momen...

Ultra-fast optical spectroscopy is a powerful tool for the observation of dynamical processes in several kind of materials. The basic time- resolved optical experiment is the so-called “pump-probe”: a first light pulse, the “pump”, resonantly triggers a photo-induced process. The subsequent system evolution can be monitored, for example, by the time–dependent transmission changes of a delayed “pro...

The restricted three body problem has an intriguing dynamics. Glo- bal surfaces of section are a tool to reduce the study of the dynamics on a three dimensional energy hypersurface to the study of an area preserving map of a two dimensional surface. The existence of such a global surface of section is far from obvious. So far mostly per- turbative methods have been used to prove its existence. How...

A single potential impurity can drastically change a low-temperature transport of strongly interacting particles in one dimension - a sys- tem which is known as the Luttinger liquid. An arbitrary weak backscattering of fermions from the impurity totally destroys their zero-temperature current while even a very strong backscattering of bosons makes no impact on their flow. On the other hand, a more...

Sommerfeld Theory Colloquium

Sommerfeld Theory Colloquium

Absolute temperature, that is the fundamental temperature scale in thermodynamics, is usually bound to be positive. Under special con- ditions, however, negative temperatures - where high-energy states are more occupied than low-energy states - are also possible. In this talk, I will present a negative temperature state for motional degrees of freedom: By tailoring the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian we...

The problem of understanding how gravity fits together with other fundamental interactions of matter has been at the forefront of the- oretical research for many decades, leading to the rich framework of string theory and M-theory. In this framework, many fundamen- tal questions are being resolved, but many remain quite mysterious, suggesting that search for novel concepts may be well justified. I...

Tremendous progresses have been achieved in the last decade in real- ising and manipulating stable and controllable quantum systems, and these made possible to experimentally study fundamental questions posed in the early days of quantum mechanics. We shall theoretical discuss recent cavity QED experiments on non-demolition quantum measurements. While they nicely illustrate postulates of quantum m...

I will describe the process of how to award Nobel Prizes and then give the history behind this year’s prize.

Remarkably, a strong candidate for Dark Matter exists within the Standard Model. Theoretical arguments suggest that QCD forces in the flavor-singlet sector may be strong enough that the H-dibaryon is a deeply-bound, compact state which is absolutely stable with a mass < 2mp. This possibility has gotten recent support from lattice QCD studies, which – although not yet at high enough resolution and...

In this seminar, I shall describe recent work by our group on iden- tifying pockets of gas at high redshift that have undergone mini- mum processing through stars. The chemical composition of such gas still bears the imprints of the first few generations of stars that formed only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, and thereby gives us clues to the physical properties of these still my...

With the discovery of the Higgs boson and the determination of its mass, the Standard Model is complete and its parameters are now known and over-constrained. I will review the status and future directions in precision electroweak physics both at high and low en- ergies. There is strong evidence that the Standard Model is correct at the level of quantum corrections, and that in the absence of majo...

Since the emergence of information theory in the middle of the 20th century, this new scientific field has been deeply entangled with statistical physics, as attested from the beginning by the use of entropy to quantify information content. The talk will explore the major impact of these transdisciplinary exchanges, with a particular focus on the important new research topic called "compressed sen...

Einstein is well known for his rejection of quantum mechanics in the form it emerged from the work of Heisenberg, Born and Schrodinger in 1926. Much less appreciated are the many seminal contributions he made to quantum theory prior to his �final scientifi�c verdict, that the theory was at best incomplete. In this talk I present an overview of Einsteins many conceptual breakthroughs and place them...

In the standard picture of a quantum phase transition, a single quantum critical point separates the phases at zero temperature. Here we show that the two-dimensional case is considerably more complex. Instead of the single point separating the antiferromagnet from the normal metal, we have discovered a broad region between these two phases where the magnetic order is destroyed but certain areas o...

In this seminar I will describe some of the hidden structures recently discovered in the scattering amplitudes of elementary particles, such as those measured at the Large Hadron Collider. These structures are responsible for the mysterious simplicity of these quantities, which is completely obscured by a calculation based on textbook techniques such as Feynman diagrams. I will then move on to dis...

Three-dimensional Einstein gravity has no local dynamical degree of freedom. Yet, it is far from being trivial when the cosmological constant is negative. (i) It admits black hole solutions. (ii) It easily allows for consistently interacting and tractable higher-spin extensions. (iii) It possesses remarkable asymptotic properties at infi�nity where an infi�nite-dimensional symmetry algebra emerges...

Several new techniques are currently being employed to probe the strong gravitational fi�eld in the vicinity of black holes. Long baselineinterferometry at sub-millimeter wavelengths sets constraints on the silhouette of the black holes in the Galactic center (SgrA*) and M87. Stars which get tidally disrupted as they orbit too close to a single black hole are being discovered at cosmological dista...

Equivalence principle violation, deviations from the inverse-square law of gravity, and long-range interactions between particle spins o�er powerful tests of beyond-the-standard-model physics. Using a torsion pendulum, a technique that dates to the 18th century, is still the most sensitive way to search for these signatures of new physics. I will talk about how the experiments are done and give an...

The conjectured relation between higher spin theories on anti de-Sitter (AdS) spaces and weakly coupled conformal �field theories is reviewed. I shall then outline the evidence in favour of a concrete duality of this kind, relating a speci�c higher spin theory on AdS3 to a family of 2d minimal model CFTs. Finally, I shall explain how this relation �ts into the framework of the familiar stringy AdS...