In some ways the ocean acts like a topological insulator. There are chiral edge modes, localised at the coast, that go clockwise in the Northern hemisphere and anti-clockwise in the Southern hemisphere. I’ll describe these features and explain how this can be understood in terms of something more familiar to high energy physicists. I’ll show that the equations that govern the long-time dynamics of the ocean can be recast as a Maxwell-Chern-Simons theory.

I'll give a basic introduction to particle-vortex duality in d=2+1 dimensions and its relation to 3d bosonization.

There exist, in d=2+1 dimensions, field theories that are supersymmetric but non-relativistic. I will show that the low-energy physics of these theories is that of the fractional quantum Hall effect. Supersymmetry provides enough analytic control to explicitly derive the ground state wavefunctions and their excitations.

I'll revisit some old of ideas of Euclidean quantum gravity, in which manifolds of different topology are summed in the path integral. I'll show that, in certain circumstances, gravitational instantons can destabilise supersymmetric Kaluza-Klein compactifications. We'll also see how one-loop divergences in quantum gravity can be subsumed into a new RG-invariant topological scale.

I'll review some progress over the past 18 months in computing Ohm's law using holography.

Strange metals are materials with numerous anomalous properties. The flow of electricity cannot be explained in the familiar language of a fluid of individual electrons, but instead requires a new strongly interacting description. In this talk, I will review some basic facts about these materials. With this as motivation, I will explain how to compute conductivity in certain strongly interacting, non-relativistic field theories which are defined holographically.

Neil Lambert (KCL) 'From D-branes to M-branes', David Tong (DAMTP) 'Quantum vortex strings' plus several presentations by PhD students on their work. Ends at 14:15. See www.mth.kcl.ac.uk/'tilde'anderl/LMSpremeeting/

As parameters in quantum mechanics are slowly varied, states undergo a non-Abelian holonomy known as Berry phase. I will review the ideas behind the Berry phase and explain how supersymmetry imposes restrictions on the holonomy. The associated non-Abelian gauge connections must obey certain first order equations which are related to the self-dual Yang-Mills equations, specifically the Hitchin equations, tt star equations, and Bogomolnyi equations. I will end by showing how one can build a BPS 't Hooft-Polyakov monopole in the lab.

Berry's phase is a beautiful and simple idea in quantum mechanics, with application to many areas of condensed matter physics. After reviewing the non-Abelian version of Berry's phase, I will explain how this concept naturally fits together with supersymmetry. I will then show how to compute Berry's phase in D-brane systems, using both traditional quantum mechanics, as well as AdS/CFT techniques.

This talk is part of the joint Triangular Seminars.

I will summarise recent progress in understanding the dynamics of vortices in gauge theories and describe how the vortices can be used as probes to extract information about the strong coupling quantum dynamics of the theory in which its embedded.