print

Holographic gauge/gravity dualities with a view towards condensed matter physics

By: Ricardo Caldeira
From:
At: C1, 1.4.14
[2018-09-21] 11:00

Gauge/gravity dualities in string theory are amongst the most fundamental topics in theoretical high-energy physics to have emerged from the past two decades of research and form a central pillar in our current understanding of gravity. These modern developments have been extremely fruitful, contributing both to increasing our knowledge about the quantum structure of spacetime, as well as our computational power in different areas of physics. The AdS/CFT correspondence, in particular, has emerged as a powerful tool with which to study strongly interacting field theories, finding applications in condensed matter theory, cosmological inflation and quantum gravity, amongst other fields. It also represents the most successful realisation to date of the holographic principle. In this seminar we will overview the status quo of these holographic techniques in string theory and provide a survey of some of their current applications in condensed matter physics. We will show in particular how strongly correlated field theories can be modelled holographically using gravitational descriptions in one dimension higher. We will also discuss the properties of superconducting phase transitions of quantum materials from an AdS/CFT point of view, together with the physics of quantum critical points and the hydrodynamic properties of condensed matter systems, such as their transport coefficients, and show how these are encoded holographically in higher-dimensional black hole solutions of classical Anti-de Sitter gravity.