Talks

Microbes get sick too. These viral infections transform the fates of microbial cells, populations, and communities. The infection and lysis of individual microbes releases new virus particles and redirects carbon and nutrients back into the environment. Yet, there is increasing evidence that the ecological outcome of infections is often nuanced and includes a spectrum of fates beyond rapid infection and lysis. This talk combines insights from mathematical models, in vivo experiments, and field data to explore how inefficient infection and non-lytic outcomes shape the use of phage as therapeutics and the impact of phage on marine ecosystems.

We discuss c-functions and their holographic counterpart for 2d field theories with Carrollian conformal fixed points in the UV and the IR, and construct asymptotically flat domain wall solutions of 3d Einstein-dilaton gravity that model holographic RG flows. arXiv: 2309.11539

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Zoom link https://pitp.zoom.us/j/94223624920?pwd=T3pxOGxnRVFVbGVnZnRuZ2NSTm8wZz09

Quantum systems typically reach thermal equilibrium rather quickly when coupled to an external thermal environment. The usual way of bounding the speed of this process is by estimating the spectral gap of the dissipative generator. However, the gap, by itself, does not always yield a reasonable estimate for the thermalization time in many-body systems: without further structure, a uniform lower bound on it only constraints the thermalization time to be polynomially growing with system size. In this talk, we will discuss that for all 2-local models with commuting Hamiltonians, the thermalization time that one can estimate from the gap is in fact much smaller than direct estimates suggest: at most logarithmic in the system size. This yields the so-called rapid mixing of dissipative dynamics. We will show this result by proving that a finite gap directly implies a lower bound on the modified logarithmic Sobolev inequality (MLSI) for the class of models we consider. The result is particularly relevant for 1D systems, for which we can prove rapid thermalization with a constant decay rate, giving a qualitative improvement over all previous results. It also applies to hypercubic lattices, graphs with exponential growth rate, and trees with sufficiently fast decaying correlations in the Gibbs state. This has consequences for the rate of thermalization towards Gibbs states, and also for their relevant Wasserstein distances and transportation cost inequalities.

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Zoom link https://pitp.zoom.us/j/91315419731?pwd=TGpFTjlHWEJZVWZkdTh6bDFKMjhQZz09