Archive of IAS Physics Group Meetings

The EHT Collaboration has recently published images of the supermassive black hole in M87. The images are dominated by a bright ring-like structure with an angular brightness asymmetry. While the diameter of this ring is resolved by the EHT, its...

Gauge/gravity duality relates certain strongly coupled CFTs with large effective central charge to semi-classical gravitational theories with AdS asymptotics. I will describe recent progress in understanding gravity duals for CFTs on non-trivial...

I will discuss recent progress about the Cardy-like asymptotics of 4d supersymmetric index on S^3, also known as superconformal index. The main observation is that Bose-Fermi cancellation that trivializes the asymptotic expression of the index can...

This talk will give a brief overview focused on six papers written by D. Gaiotto, G. Moore, and A. Neitzke
loosely centered around the topics mentioned in the title. The papers are on the arXiv.
Background reading: Some short reviews are:
https:/...

We will introduce ourselves and give a 2 minute description of what we are interested in at the moment.
The plan for future group meetings is to have some review talks, or topics for discussions. So please think about suggestions for things you...

I will discuss recent work that studies the evolution of the von Neumann entropy of a holographic boundary system dual to an evaporating black hole in AdS. This entropy is computed via the Engelhardt-Wall prescription of extremizing the generalized...

We consider supersymmetric $AdS_3\times Y_7$ solutions of type IIB supergravity dual to N=(0,2) SCFTs in d=2, as well as $AdS_2\times Y_9$ solutions of D=11 supergravity dual to N=2 supersymmetric quantum mechanics, some of which arise as the near...

Our Universe is filled with Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation having an almost perfect black body spectrum with a temperature of To=2.7K. The number density of photons in our Universe exceeds the number density of electrons by a factor of...

The LIGO/VIRGO collaboration has just started their observing run 3. I will first give an introduction to gravitational wave searches and the events that have been found so far and describe some of the interesting astrophysics problems that might be...

Motivated by an apparent counterexample to the Weak Gravity Conjecture, I will describe the difference between black hole extremality bounds and BPS bounds and (relatedly) the difference between superextremal particles and self-repulsive particles...