Geometry emerging from dynamics

15:15   Prof. Lesya Shchutska
15:55   Prof. Victor Gorbenko
16:35   Prof. Mike Seidel

I will talk about two rather different topics which, nevertheless, share a common physical mechanism: geometry, including space, time and gravitation, emerges from constituents that live in a different space with a different dimensionality. First topic is confinement in QCD. Confinement has been confirmed experimentally and numerically, but is still poorly understood theoretically. The core of the phenomenon is formation of geometric objects: confining strings whose worldsheets create two-dimensional surfaces. Second topic is expansion of the Universe, or cosmology, in which at the quantum level the spacetime itself should emerge as an approximate description of some fundamental objects, yet to be determined.

Bio
Victor Gorbenko was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in 1989.
He received his degree from Saint Petersburg State University in 2010 and his PhD from New York University in 2015 for his work on confining flux tubes and two-dimensional gravity. After that he was doing research as a postdoc at Stanford University and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Beginning February 2022 he is the head of the Laboratory for Theoretical Fundamental Physics at EPFL.