EPT Seminar - Vazha LoLadze, UMD

Speaker: Vazha Loladze, University of Maryland

Title: Localised Horizons, Confinement, and Gravitational Waves

Abstract:  Recent advances in gravitational wave astronomy have opened new avenues for exploring physics beyond the Standard Model. One of the most well-motivated sources of such gravitational waves is a first-order confinement transition in strongly coupled gauge theories. However, strong coupling makes these transitions challenging to study. In this talk, I will use complementary approaches to extract their key properties. I will first focus on lattice results for the confinement transition in pure SU(N) Yang-Mills theory. These results point toward an unexpectedly small value of maximal achievable supercooling - a key quantity for predicting the resulting gravitational wave signal. Motivated by this observation, I will turn to holography, where confining 4D gauge theories can be modeled by 5D Einstein-scalar gravity. By generalising the gravitational dual to D+1 dimensions and using 1/D as an expansion parameter, I will show that, for a large class of theories, some thermodynamic properties are independent of the details of the scalar potential. Remarkably, the black brane geometry dual to the deconfined phase can be analytically constructed due to its effects being localised near the horizon. Based on this solution, I will establish the connection between the degree of scale invariance breaking and the maximal achievable supercooling in these theories. At the end of the talk, I will discuss the phenomenological importance of our findings.

EPT Zoom link: https://umd.zoom.us/j/98156909829?pwd=HKSCcZchnrAY9ncEKmUoW47Cve7XAJ.1
Meeting ID: 981 5690 9829
Passcode: UMDEPT