Two talks by Dr. Rishi Sharma (Los Alamos National Laboratory)

Dr Rishi Sharma, an IITB Physics alumni came to the department yesterday to give a talk on Superfluid heat conduction in neutron star crust. I could not understand most parts of the talk since there were many things which I am not familiar with. But today he gave another talk which I found very interesting. It was about application of AdS-CFT correspondence in hydrodynamics which is pretty interesting from relativistic heavy ion collision point of view. Although I don't work on string theory, I had some qualitative knowledge about AdS-CFT and all. But I never saw how it can be used to do some real-life calculations. Today Dr. Sharma spent a lot of time on it to show how it can be used to calculate shear viscosity which otherwise is not possible using perturbative QCD. He basically considers a N=4 Super Yang Mills theory in our world with number of colors very high, maps this theory into type II B string theory in 10 dimensions. He calculates the required partition function and all in a classical supergravity theory in a AdS5 spacetime and by this AdS-CFT duality we can use to same result in our world also. According to him this was the first application of AdS-CFT to so called phenomenology. The reference he has given are http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0104066 and http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0405231. He is also planning to give this second talk in TIFR today.