Dear Colleagues,
The INT would like to continue its program of high calibre seminars, so we've decided to go online with them. Please join us for what we hope will be the first of many o-S@INT seminars, presented by Tom Cohen: "Surprises in large N Thermodynamics" (abstract below).
The talk will be given via Zoom at the following link - https://washington.zoom.us/j/503329151 - on Thursday, April 2nd, at 10 AM Pacific Time. The format is similar to the usual one-hour time slot with a ~40 min talk, and a moderator facilitating questions from audience members. We look forward to seeing you there!
Abstract
The thermodynamic behavior of QCD at large N has been studied for decades. Despite this, there are a number of features that are not widely appreciated and are quite surprising. I this talk we note a few of these under the assumption that QCD has a generic first-order phase transition at large N as one sees for pure gauge theory. The existence of a first-order transition implies metastable phases. One surprise is that under this assumption large N QCD has a supercooled metastable plasma phase with negative absolute pressure---that is a pressure below that of the vacuum. Another surprise concerns the region beyond the endpoint of the superheated hadronic which, though both globally and locally unstable is never-the-less parametrically long lived at large N.