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Colloquium: From black holes to superfluidity: effective theories of point-like particles.
Add to Calendar 2023-02-02T20:45:00 2023-02-02T21:45:00 UTC Colloquium: From black holes to superfluidity: effective theories of point-like particles. 101 Osmond and Zoom: https://psu.zoom.us/j/93946951319?pwd=dFVHR21XbDExR0JQanNBUldENEFvQT09
Start DateThu, Feb 02, 2023
3:45 PM
to
End DateThu, Feb 02, 2023
4:45 PM
Presented By
Riccardo Penco, Carnegie Mellon University
Event Series: Physics Colloquium

We are fortunate to live in an era of great discoveries (Higgs boson, gravitational waves, …), and most of the theoretical understanding that made this possible is based on effective field theories (EFTs). In this talk, I will show how these powerful techniques can be applied across the spectrum of theoretical physics, leading to new discoveries and allowing us to draw unexpected connections among very different systems. To illustrate this, I will discuss two interesting but very different phenomena---static response of black holes and roton excitations in superfluids---and show how they can be both be described using a point-like particle EFT. On the one hand, studying black hole response through the lens of EFT has led over the last couple of years to the discovery of a network of hidden symmetries that set black holes apart from any other macroscopic object. On the other hand, treating rotons as point-like particles--albeit of a very special kind--has allowed us to correct classic results by Landau and Khalatnikov on roton-phonon scattering, and to pose and answer the intriguing question: do rotons sink or float?