Comments on “Exactly Marginal Deformations and Global Symmetries”

Last time I pointed to the paper by Green, Komargodski, Seiberg, Tachikawa and Wecht (GKSTW) I was asked to show what I would have done differently. Here is a sketch of some things that I would have put as a part of the main paper (this is not to be assumed to be comprehensive, or [...]

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Must read papers of the week

The Gravity Research Foundation announced the results of the 2010 competition. Here are the results. At UCSB we discussed the prize-winning paper by Mark van Raamsdonk today. It was a very lively discussion and we thought it was a great paper to read. Mark’s paper provided some very tantalyzing evidence that entanglement seems to play [...]

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Finding pretty patterns in scientific graphs

Here is a graph I produced today as I was studying some problems I’m interested in. The important thing is not what the graph represents physically: it’s just a bunch of trajectories in a Hamiltonian system. What is interesting is that the patterns look pretty and seem to have meaning.

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Wall street blips

I don’t know how many of the readers here pay attention to what’s happening in Wall Street. Yesterdays trade was quite spectacular, although from many points of view it is terrifying and it is a day that will probably live in infamy.  From the academic point of view I’m sure it will be studied to [...]

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The quest for Quantum Ideal liquids

Clifford Johnson pointed to me his post on the quest for perfect quantum fluids. In a certain sense, we are used to thinking about fluids as low energy phenomena (relatively low temperature physics). Famous fluids are characterized by fun properties like superfluidity, or ferrofluids that can be a lot fund to play with in an [...]

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