Date/Time
Date(s) - 08/10/2014
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Title: From Renormalization Group to Emergent Gravity

Speaker: Dr. Sung-Sik Lee

Institute: McMaster University

Location: ABB 102

Description:

Renormalization group (RG) flow tells us how behaviours of physical systems evolve as they are probed at progressively larger length scales. RG is so universal and central to our current understanding of nature that it is not easy to understand many phenomena that range from phase
transitions to quark confinement without it. It turns out that RG may be also useful in unifying quantum mechanics and gravity, which has baffled physicists for a long time. In this talk, I will introduce a conjecture (called AdS/CFT correspondence) made by Maldacena in 1997 that relates a
D-dimensional system without gravity to a (D+1)-dimensional system with quantum gravity, and explain how RG may provide a way to prove the conjecture and go beyond.