Week 27.03.2023 – 02.04.2023

“Special” geometries, such as Calabi-Yau manifolds, play a central role in multiple areas of string theory, as well as gravitational theories more generally. The goal of these lectures is to introduce some of the formalism and tools useful for characterising such geometries, pitched at the level of a starting PhD student. We will start with purely geometrical backgrounds using the general notions of a G-structure and special holonomy and then will go on to describe backgrounds that also have non-trivial fluxes. We will be guided by applications to string phenomenology and the AdS/CFT correspondence.

Please visit https://lonti.weebly.com/spring-2023-series.html for more information.

Abstract: Biotech lies at the intersection of rapid technological and life-scientific developments. Its central premise is alluring: leverage cutting-edge technologies and scientific discoveries and loosen the hold of disease over humanity.
Join for an informal chat about drugs, the organisations developing them and the individuals doing the work. What’s life like in a modern pharmaceutical company? Why would theoretical physicists be interested in joining one? And how do you make that transition?

Bio: Dom got his PhD in theoretical physics from Imperial College London\DSEMIC his thesis “Algebraic Constructions of 3d N=4 Coulomb Branches” was supervised by Amihay Hanany. He started moving to machine learning in 2019 as a research intern and is now Senior AI Research Scientist at Exscientia, a drug discovery pharmatech company, where he focuses on synthetic chemistry and accelerating drug development.

In the dS/CFT correspondence, bulk states on global spacelike slices of de Sitter space are dual to (in general) entangled states in the tensor product of the dual CFT Hilbert space with itself. We show, using a quasinormal mode basis, that the Euclidean vacuum (for free scalars in a certain mass range) is a thermofield double state in the dual CFT description, and that the global de Sitter geometry emerges from quantum entanglement between two copies of the CFT. Tracing over one copy of the CFT produces a mixed thermal state describing a single static causal diamond.