Speaker: Aram Harrow (MIT) Title: "Zeros of the partition function and their algorithmic application" Venue&Time: Gray Room 1 / 11:30 Abstract: "At high temperatures quantum systems generally lose long-range order. We would expect that this makes them easier to simulate. One way to understand this is through the analytic properties of the partition function. Viewing […]
Strings, Pheno and the Swampland (SPS) Journal Club Speaker: Vincent Menet (Università Milano Bicocca) Title: 'Calibration, fuzziness: new results on AdS vacuum decay' Venue&Time: Red Room / 11:30 Abstract: Motivated by swampland conjectures, we study the stability of AdS type II supergravity vacua. In the literature, vacuum decay mediated by abelian D-branes […]
Jaime Fernandez Tejedor (IFT) will present "On the Inverse Problem in Effective Field Theory". Venue&Time: Gray Room 2 / 12:00 Abstract: We show that the tree-level spectrum of heavy particles can be directly extracted from the Wilson coefficients of the corresponding effective field theory at low energies. This procedure is exact when the number of […]
Title: Entanglement through topological interfaces in CFT revisited Speaker: Christian Northe (Institute of Physics, Prague) Venue&Time: Red Room / 15:00 Abstract: Present theoretical predictions for the entanglement entropy through topological defects are violated in numerical simulations of critical systems. In this talk, I discuss a paradigm shift in the preparation of reduced density matrices in […]
Title: 'Primordial Black Holes -- Positivist Perspective, Quantum Quiddity and Galaxy Genesis' Speaker: Florian Kühnel, (TU Dortmund & LMU Munich) Venue&Time: Red Room / 15:00 Abstract: Primordial black holes are black holes that may have formed in the early Universe. Their masses potentially span a range from as low as the Planck mass up to […]
Speaker: Martin Sasieta (U. Berkeley) Title: 'Emergence of Closed Universes in Holography' Venue&Time: Gray Room 3 / 11:30 Abstract: I will present recent constructions of closed universes in AdS/CFT and AdS2 holography, and discuss some of the puzzles they pose.
Every Tuesday at 2:00 PM in the discussion room on the 5th floor. Join the IFT cosmology/gravity journal club at benty-fields.com to vote for papers and volunteer to present them
Title: Buckets versus pipes: the neutron lifetime puzzle Speaker: Benjamin Grinstein, University of California, San Diego Date and time: 15:30h (CEST), Wednesday, May 13, 2026 Location: CFTMAT Auditorium Abstract: A precise knowledge of the neutron lifetime is important because it serves as a fundamental input for Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) models, which predict the primordial abundances of light […]
Strings, Pheno and the Swampland (SPS) Journal Club Title: 'Type IIB at Eight Derivatives: A Status Report' Speaker: Raffaele Savelli (Dipartimento di Fisica & INFN, Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”) Venue&Time: Red Room / 11:30 Abstract: Knowledge of ten-dimensional superstring effective actions beyond the leading order in the derivative expansion is of intrinsic interest and […]
Title: 'Perturbative aspect of electroweak phase transitions in the Early Universe' Speaker: Andrii Dashko (DESY) Venue&Time: Blue Room / 12:00 Abstract: We present a study of the perturbative description of thermally driven electroweak phase transitions (EWPT) in the early universe. Focusing on strong first-order transitions, which are relevant for gravitational wave cosmology, we examine the […]