Talks

The duality between theories of quantum strings and Yang-Mills gauge theories, in particular the AdS/CFT conjecture, has over the years given rise to many important physical insights. Recently, the realization that both sides of the duality, in certain limits, can be be described by integrable systems has lead to a good deal of progress. In this talk we will review the construction of these integrable structures and their usefulness in understanding strings in curved backgrounds/strongly coupled gauge theories. We will discuss how the asymptotic S-matrix that enters the Bethe equations for gauge theory anomalous dimensions provides a very convenient description of the system and how it can be reproduced from the classical string theory. Further, we will outline some partial attempts to extend this equivalence, and the corresponding integrable structures, to include world-sheet quantum loop effects.

I first summarize how the recent avalanche of precision measurements involving the cosmic microwave background, galaxy clustering, the Lyman alpha forest, gravitational lensing, supernovae Ia and other tools probes has transformed our understanding of our universe. I then discuss key open problems such as the nature of dark matter, dark energy and the early universe.

With a cosmic flight simulator, we'll take a scenic journey through space and time. After exploring our local Galactic neighborhood, we'll travel back 13.7 billion years to explore the Big Bang itself and how state-of-the-art measurements are transforming our understanding of our cosmic origin and ultimate fate. We then turn to the question of whether this can all be described purely mathematically, and discuss implications ranging from standard physics topics like symmetries, irreducible representations, units, free parameters and initial conditions to broader issues like parallel universes, simulations and and Goedel incompleteness.

Cosmology ultimately aims to explain the initial conditions at the beginning of time and the entire subsequent evolution of the universe. The "beginning of time" can be understood in the Wheeler-DeWitt approach to quantum gravity, where homogeneous universes are described by a Schroedinger equation with a potential barrier. Quantum tunneling through the barrier is interpreted as a spontaneous creation of a small (Planck-size) closed universe, which then enters the regime of cosmological inflation and reaches an extremely large size. After sufficient growth, the universe can be adequately described as a classical spacetime with quantum matter. The initial quantum state of matter in the created universe can be determined by solving the Schroedinger equation with appropriate boundary conditions. I show that the most likely initial state is close to the vacuum state. This is the initial condition for inflation favored both by observational data and theoretical considerations.

Quantum Groups in Physics. With the gained background we want to review known quantum groups that became relevant in physics. Especially q-Deformation, kappa-Poincare- and theta-Poincare-Algebras are discussed.