Conferences  >  Physics  >  High Energy Physics, Particles and Fields  >  South Korea

APCTP, Pohang (Korea)

Black holes are playing an ever increasing role in fundamental physics, from information theory to quantum gravity and holography. They are now under active investigation in many important branches of observational, theoretical and mathematical physics. In particular, they have stimulated important advances in the computation of entanglement entropies in large N conformal field theory and in various aspects of gauge theory/gravity duality. This workshop gathers researchers working on mathematical problems related to the holographic description of black holes, in its quantum aspects. The workshop will stimulate progress at this cutting edge of theoretical high energy physics.

Astronomy, Astrophysics and Cosmology,    Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Information Theory

General relativity is one of the cornerstones of modern experimental and theoretical physics, it successfully described and predicted an immense variety of gravitational phenomena over the past hundred years. In particular, the status of the theory has been upgraded to higher levels with the recent observations of gravitational waves in the process of merging of black holes and neutron stars, as well as the first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy. In spite of the incredible progress of string theory and holography, quantum aspects of gravity still remain as significant challenges. To investigate the deeper structure of gravity, extensions of General Relativity with enhanced spacetime symmetry motivated by string theory in various regimes are natural candidates to explore, providing fruitful arenas where one can test our understanding of spacetime. It will be highly important to study whether the new gravitational theory can make new predictions compared to General Relativity, and whether it fits well with astrophysical experimental data. Two new gravity theories motivated by string theory and supergravity have the virtue of being extremely constrained by their gauge symmetries, allowing to study their structures and predictions in a very systematic way, that is, in a top-down manner, beyond phenomenological model buildings. These two active research topics are higher spin gravity and double field theory.

CTPU, Institute for Basic Science, Daejeon, Korea

In this program we plan to invite a critical mass of researchers with complementary expertise from across the mathematical physics, condensed-matter physics and string theory communities, to promote common interests and collaborations, discover and open up new directions, and in particular, to develop applications to realistic physical systems.

Integrability has played a central role in understanding non-perturbative QFTs quantitatively leading to important applications in condensed matter physics, mathematical physics and more recently, in string theory. There is considerable activity brewing at the interface of these areas. An important recent development is given by integrability-preserving deformations, which includes the TTbar deformation. This progress further expands the scope of integrability to a larger class of models. At the same time, it leads to new insights on fundamental concepts of 2d quantum field theories such as UV completeness and locality. Another promising and active approach toward nonperturbative physics is provided by duality. In particular, dualities found in the AdS/CFT correspondence and its extensions, known as holography, have provided new insights and exact results by employing exact methods such as integrability and localization. AdS/CFT integrability has inspired remarkable advances in the study of correlation functions, including single-trace operators and those involving D-brane in AdS. The techniques employed are closely connected to the study of finite- volume form factors, and of non-equilibrium dynamics in condensed matter physics. Interest in CFT correlators also connects with the conformal bootstrap program, to which integrability is poised to contribute. As examples of how this might happen, links between Calogero-Sutherland models and conformal blocks have been established; non-perturbative methods for computing OPE coefficients which combine numerical conformal bootstrap approach and integrability have been initiated. Exploring this rich web of connections, between different areas of physics and mathematical physics, is in its infancy.