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IAP 2011 Activity


MIT Physics Lecture Series:i

String Theory Makes Forests from Trees
Professor John McGreevy
Thu Jan 27, 01:30-02:30pm, 6-120

No enrollment limit, no advance sign up
Participants welcome at individual sessions (series)

In order to understand the behavior of a system with many degrees of freedom, in physics or otherwise, some selective inattention is necessary. A description of interesting, big-picture, long-wavelength phenomena requires us to average over what the microscopic, fast-moving constituents are doing.

This coarse-graining procedure is almost always hard to do in practice. In the last decade, an amazing relation between many-body systems and gravity in extra dimensions (called holographic duality) was discovered using string theory. When it can be applied, holographic duality does the coarse-graining for us.

I will conclude with a discussion of recent attempts to say something about interesting states of matter using holographic duality.
Contact: Nancy Boyce, 4-315, 253-4461, nboyce@mit.edu
Sponsor: Physics
Latest update: 14-Dec-2010


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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Last update: 7 Sept. 2011