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High Energy Theory Seminar

Friday, May 3, 2024
11:00am to 12:00pm
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Online and In-Person Event
Bound on the thermalization time of d>2 CFTs
Luca Delacretaz, University of Chicago,

Interacting systems thermalize. They can do so arbitrarily slowly, but not arbitrarily fast: the time scale necessary for a quantum many-body system to reach local thermal equilibrium has been conjectured to be bounded below by the Planckian time, \hbar/T. Using EFT approaches to hydrodynamics, I will argue for a "bottoms-up" proof of this bound for CFTs in spacetime dimensions d>2, by showing that the strong coupling scale of hydrodynamics must be lesser than the temperature T. The proof involves knowledge of power-law corrections to hydrodynamic correlators at late times, as well as causality constraints in the thermal state.

The talk is in 469 Lauritsen.

Contact theoryinfo@caltech.edu for Zoom information.