Matteo Baggioli (IFT Madrid) will be delivering a mini-course comprising of about 5 lectures of 90 mins each on applied holography during Sep 16-20. The lectures will be held at HSB 203, Department of Physics, IIT Madras. The course will also involve hands-on-training sessions on computational techniques. The lecture notes have appeared on arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.02667 and hopefully will be published … Continue reading Mini-Course on Applied Holography at IIT Madras →

Day 4 was rest day. Two new courses started on day 5. The first was on stability in GR by Prashant. The question that one addresses in this course is 'how do we test if a given space-time is stable under perturbations?' If there is an event horizon for example and if I throw in … Continue reading ST4 diaries, day 5 →

In today's lecture on D-branes Subhroneel showed how to obtain a black hole solution from 3 M2 branes. In Type IIA string theory this becomes 2 D2s and a fundamental string. T-dualizing, we get a D1 and a D5 brane together with a momentum mode. Subhroneel then showed us one way to count the number … Continue reading ST4 day 3 →

Day 2: I had forgotten to mention this before, but one of the new things that's been done in ST4 this year is to have invited a writer over for the conference. The writer in question is Thomas Manuel, who is a friend of mine, but I had not known about this plan before I … Continue reading ST4 diaries: day 2 →

The conference started at 9 o'clock today, which was too early for me. First there was an introduction session. The organizers had asked participants to prepare a slide listing  their research interests and current topics of research. In the introduction session the participants introduced themselves and read out their research interests from their respective slides. … Continue reading ST4 diaries: Day 1 →

  I am in IISER Bhopal right now for the $latex \text{ST}^4$ conference. I will try to maintain this journal recording my experience of this conference, both the science and the rest. For those who have not heard of this, $latex \text{ST}^4$ is a conference that is organized and attended exclusively by students and postdocs … Continue reading ST^4 Diaries →

The list of references for Kalyana Rama's string theory course is here.

The coming week is going to be the busiest one in a long time. We have a veritable smorgasbord of THEP talks all lined up. Monday 11/3 CMI seminar2.00 pm, Lecture Hall 801 Extremal surfaces, de Sitter entropy and entanglement in ghost systemsK Narayan, Chennai Mathematical InstituteAbstract: We find connected codim-2 extremal surfaces stretching between … Continue reading Talks this Week →

Sujay Ashok (IMSc) will continue his series of lectures on Seiberg and Witten's exact solution of low energy effective action of N = 2 supersymmetric gauge theories. He will be describing how embedding these gauge theories in string theory helps us to obtain the Seiberg-Witten solution explicitly. Title : Pedagogical lectures on N=2 supersymmetric gauge … Continue reading Lectures on N=2 Supersymmetric theories contd →

Kalyana Rama will give an introductory course on String Theory in IMSc, starting from Feb 18. We append his mail below: Hi, To those interested: I will give about 20 introductory lectures on string theory, in Hall 123, from 0930 to 1100 on mondays and wednesdays starting from 18 Feb 2019. A class on friday … Continue reading Introductory course on String Theory at IMSc →