Selected results of department 29

This work is a detailed study of the holographic duality between Vasiliev's higher spin theory and two-dimensional minimal model conformal field theories (CFTs) with WN symmetry. It uses symmetry arguments to identify the precise states dual to conical defects, correcting an earlier proposal, and to excitations of Vasiliev's scalar field. This work is important as it shows a highly nontrivial matching of the spectra of the CFT and Vasiliev's theory.

For a long time scientists suspected relation between classical solutions of open string field theory and D-brane configurations in string theory which can be described by boundary states of conformal field theory. In this paper we have proposed for the first time a very explicit construction of such a state from a given classical solution. This has opened new possibilities for using string field theory as a tool to study new boundary conditions in 2D conformal field theories.

The classical solutions of open string field theory are solitonic extended objects whose fluctuation spectra are described by open strings. At the turn of the millennium, Ashoke Sen discovered that tachyonic modes lead to instabilities of these solitionic objects and that there are classical solutions describing various endpoints with the expected properties, and among them a solution with no soliton. A group of researchers at MIT speculated that reverse phenomenon might occur, namely that there can be classical solutions describing multiple xerox copies of the original soliton. The whole text »

Study of heavy ion collisions at ultra high energies represents a major subject in the contemporary nuclear and particle physics. The fundamental motivation is to understand the properties of the new state of matter known as quark-gluon plasma which is predicted by Quantum Chromo-Dynamics to occur at very high temperatures and energy densities. In this work the ALICE experiment at LHC in CERN measured the azimuthal distribution of particles and found that the plasma behaves as a viscous fluid.