2-11 October 2008
San Carlos, Sonora, México
America/Hermosillo timezone
- bamr@nucleares.unam.mx
Support
Contribution
Speakers
- Dr. Samuel VAZQUEZ
Primary authors
- Dr. Samuel VAZQUEZ (Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics)
Description
Many low dimensional condensed matter systems exhibit zero temperature phase
transitions driven by quantum fluctuations. These are known as “quantum”
phase transitions. The description of such transitions is beyond the usual
Landau-Ginzburg-Wilson paradigm of a single order parameter. At criticality,
such systems exhibit novel behavior including the appearance of fractional
statistics, gauge symmetries and scale invariance. We study a novel type of
critical points described by 2+1 non-relativistic field theories. For a
special value of the “dynamical critical exponent” z= 2, such theories are
known to describe the transition between ordered (confined) phases and novel
topological (deconfined) phases. Moreover, they have the remarkable property
that the ground state wave functional can be written as a partition function
of an (euclidean) two dimensional CFT. We use the AdS/CFT correspondence to
study possible duals of such theories. In particular, we begin a systematic
study of the holographic RG flow in the bulk. This allow us to compute
expectation values and correlation functions in the ground state of the
critical theory. In this talk we will focus on the “stress tensor”. Our
ultimate goal is to understand the transition to a topological phase using
AdS/CFT.