Search Talks

In this talk I will discuss the applications of the gauge/gravity duality to the strongly coupled quark gluon plasma, focusing in particular on the role of the shear viscosity to entropy ratio. It has been argued that the lower bound on the shear viscosity to entropy density in strongly coupled plasmas can be understood in terms of microcausality violation in the dual gravitational description. However, since the transport properties of the system characterize its infrared dynamics, while the causality of the theory is determined by its ultraviolet behavior, the link between the viscosity bound and microcausality should not be applicable in theories that undergo low temperature phase transitions. I will discuss an explicit holographic model confirming this fact, in which there is a ``decoupling'' of UV from IR physics.

The counter-intuitive phenomena in quantum mechanics are often based on the counter-factual (or virtual) processes. The famous example is the Hardy paradox, which has been recently solved in two independent experiments. Also, the delayed choice experiment and one of quantum descriptions of the closed time like curves can be also examples of the counter-intuitive phenomena. The counter-factual processes can be characterized by the weak value initiated by Yakir Aharonov and his colleagues. In this talk, I will introduce the weak value from the probability theory and the connection to the counter-factual processes in these examples.

AdS/CFT has proven itself a powerful tool in extending our understanding of strongly coupled quantum theories. While studies of AdS/CFT have predominantly focused on tree level calculations, there has been growing interest in the loop effect recently. We studied the 1-loop correction to the gauge boundary-to-boundary correlator due to its coupling to a complex scalar field. In this talk, I would outline our main results, explain the Cutkosky rule in AdS space, and discuss an extra divergence we found in both real and imaginary part of the loop integral. I would then combine our analysis with the replica trick to demonstrate a possible application where one attempts to calculate the DC conductivity in a condensed matter system with random disorder and discuss the limitation and difficulties of our method in its current form.