Physics Group Meeting

Fluid dynamics is a centuries old phenomenological framework at the centre of various fields of science and engineering. But, we have only recently began to appreciate its claim as a paradigmatic effective field theory of mixed states and its usefulness in improving our understanding of strongly interacting quantum field theories/black holes.

Compared to the usual Wilsonian effective field theories, fluid dynamics exhibits various novel features.

Three features have invoked a lot of recent interest in the subject :

1) Existence of hydrostatic configurations

2) Existence of a local entropy current which satisfies a local version of second law

3) The close interplay between fluctuation and dissipation.

Much work in past few years has been devoted to seeing how these features modify our usual intuitions about Wilsonian effective field theories. I would like to discuss these new results and the open questions they leave behind. I would also like to discuss and receive comments on what this emerging framework means for black hole physics.

References : Initial papers behind much of recent work

http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.3544

http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.3556

http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.0220

A review of these can be found in part I of http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.00636 and a short summary of it is in http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.1090