North British Mathematical Physics Seminar 34

The thirty-fourth meeting of the North British Mathematical Physics Seminar place on Friday 18th May 2012 at the King's Manor, University of York.

These people participated.

King's Manor. is in the centre of the city, 5 minutes' walk from the railway station. To get there, turn left out of the station, under the wall, left over the bridge over the river, then left after 100m at the crossroads (see map). The King's Manor is in Exhibition Square, to the left of the city art gallery.

Refreshments will be in the refectory and lunch in the Theatre Royal Cafe (paying individually). To get to the refectory go through the porters' lodge and up the stone staircase towards the end of the first court on the left. Talks will be in K/133, entered either through the refectory (back of the theatre) or at the far left-hand corner of the furthest court (which brings you in at the front of the theatre).

This is the lunch receipt.

Programme

1045-1115
Coffee
1120-1220
Jiannis Pachos (Leeds)
Seeing topological order
In this talk I will provide a general methodology to directly measure topological order in a physical system. As an application I consider a characteristic topological model, introduced by Haldane. I will show how the topological order of this model can be directly revealed in the form of momentum space skyrmions.
1220-1330
Lunch
1330-1430
Kimyeong Lee (KIAS / Newton Institute)
N-cubic degrees of freedom and junctions in 6d (2,0) superconformal theories
1430-1500
Maria Johnstone (Edinburgh)
Emergent IR dual 2d CFTs in charged AdS5 black holes
I will discuss the low energy excitations of near-extremal R-charged global AdS5 black holes, when a vanishing horizon area is combined with a large N limit of the dual gauge theory. The local AdS3 throats appearing in the near horizon geometry of both the near-BPS and non-BPS regimes suggest the existence of dual 2d CFT duals, which can be compared to those predicted by the Kerr/CFT correspondence.
1500-1545
Tea
1545-1645
Vincent Caudrelier (City U, London)
Vector solitons on the half-line: new mathematics from “old” physics
Using the inverse scattering method combined with a nonlinear mirror image technique, we obtain the N-soliton solution of the vector nonlinear Schrödinger equation on the half-line with integrable boundary conditions. Historically, this model (known as the Manakov model) emerged as an improvement of the nonlinear Schrödinger equation to take into account the polarization of light propagating in a nonlinear medium. Our results are used to demonstrate interesting effects of the boundary on the polarizations of the vectors, resulting in a potential control of the polarizations. Then, we will go on discussing the important property of factorization of vector solitons interactions and will unravel a new mathematical structure related to the so-called set theoretical Yang-Baxter equations. This constitutes yet another argument that solitons, here with internal degrees of freedom, do behave like quantum particles although they are purely classical (and nonlinear) effects.
1645-1715
Sam Palmer (Heriot-Watt)
Magnetic bags and more
Magnetic bags are the limit of infinitely many SU(2) monopoles such that a surface is formed, inside of which the monopole fields vanish and outside of which the behaviour is similar to an ordinary monopole. A Nahm transform has been developed which utilizes non-commutative geometry and which is far more transparent than the ordinary Nahm transform. This can be extended to magnetic walls and chains and also to self-dual strings in M-Theory.
1730
Close

Practical Information

This is the map to get you from the railway station to King's Manor (the university-provided one doesn't show the station).

If you come by car I'm afraid you'll need to take your chances in the city centre car parks.

Limited funds are available to help with travel expenses of those with no other source of funding, especially postgraduate students and postdocs. Please book early to take advantage of the cheaper advance-purchase train fares. For how to claim please see the main NBMPS page.

If you wish to attend the meeting, or for further questions, please email the local organisers:

Niall MacKay or Eli Hawkins.