Well, as I said in the previous post, I’m leaving my hideaway/retreat mode and popping over to Vancouver for a short spell to help out at a Summer School. It’s the PIMS (Pacific Institute for Mathematical Sciences) Summer School on Particles, Fields, and Strings. I’m giving four lectures on some of the techniques in string theory that it helps to know in order to do some of the fun things we do to get at interesting physics (such as the topic of the post before). My title is something like “Perturbative and non-perturbative string theory”, and I’ve no clue what the level of the students really is, so goodness knows how far I will get in four one hour lectures. But it does not hurt to try. I’ll be laying the groundwork for several of the lecturers who will be talking about the more advanced stuff closer to their research work, and so I hope to at least help the students gain confidence with ideas and language that will show up all over the place in the two weeks following my presentations.
So what will I cover? Well, I’m going to tailor things to the responses of the students as I go along, but my default plan is to go over the construction of the most commonly used string theories in the areas in question (the focus seems to be gauge/gravity duals and applications to strongly coupled systems such as quark-gluon plasmas, various condensed matter systems, and maybe also the new trapped atom applications that are getting going), uncovering ideas and techniques for extracting various bits of physics – emergence of gravity at low energy, T-duality, D-branes. Maybe a bit on how to organize certain computations involving D-branes, using the two well-trodden limits: A single D-brane described in terms of its world-volume fields, and many D-branes described in terms of their collective spacetime footprint. I doubt I’ll get much further, but that’s really the basic toolbox right there, with which a lot can be computed.
It’s always fun to be in Vancouver. Even though I won’t get to see any of the city this visit (just like last time, in the Spring when I came by to talk in a short and excellent workshop), the UBC research group and physicists from the surrounding area constitute a really excellent collection of people to spend time with, so it’s be good to see them again.
-cvj
