ADS/CFT CORRESPONDENCE
Informal Seminars - Fall 2010

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Notes (pdf format)

The HET Group

WHAT: This is a series of informal seminars on the AdS/CFT correspondence. The subject is an active field of research which emerged from efforts to build a quantum theory of gravity (string theory) and has found surprising applications in strongly coupled systems. I will give a pedagogical introduction motivating the ideas, developing them and applying them to systems of interest (quark-gluon plasma in heavy ion collisions, condensed matter (superconductors), etc.) over the course of the semester.
WHEN: Each Wednesday at 1:15 pm
WHERE: Room 405 in Earth & Planetary Sciences Building
TEXTBOOKS: String Theory, Vols. I and II, by Joseph Polchinski, Cambridge.
D-Branes, by Clifford V. Johnson, Cambridge.
String Theory in a Nutshell, by Elias Kiritsis, Princeton.
A First Course in String Theory, by Barton Zwiebach, Cambridge.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Lecture 1 Lecture 1: Path Integral
Lecture 2 Lecture 2: Schwarzschild Black Hole
Lecture 3 Lecture 3: Reissner-N\"ordstrom Black Hole
Lecture 4 Lecture 4: Black Branes from String Theory
Lecture 5 Lecture 5: Microscopic Calculation of Entropy and Hawking Radiation
Lecture 6 Lecture 6: AdS/CFT Correspondence
Lecture 7 Lecture 7: Finite Temperature
Lecture 8 Lecture 8: Finite Volume and Hawking-Page phase transition
Lecture 9 Lecture 9: Transport properties

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^Department of Physics and Astronomy  --- e-mail: siopsis AT tennessee DOT edu

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