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THEORETICAL PHYSICS
SEMINAR
Monday, December 3, 2007
12:00 pm, CP
179
Dr. THOMAS COHEN
IS THERE A "MOST PERFECT" FLUID
CONSISTENT WITH QUANTUM FIELD THEORY?
ABSTRACT
Kovtun, Son and Starinets proposed a universal lower bound on the ratio of shear viscosity to entropy density of 1/(4 Pi) in units where hbar and Boltzmann's constant are fixed to unity.. This proposal was motivated by remarkable results for transport properties of a fluid obtained using the AdS/CFT correspondence and by the fact known real-world fluids appear to obey the bound. This talk surveys the status of the bound and its possible origins by considering models, which are theoretically consistent based on some set of assumptions (eg. quantum mechanics, quantum field theory) in which the bound is violated.
Everyone is welcome