State of flux

Recent developments have radically changed two of the projects I'm working on which means that I'm now feeling in a bit of a state of chaos, in a good way, I think. This means that besides juggling last night in a flood-lit parking lot with the Beijing juggling club from 10pm till midnight last night (our venue was being deconstructed next to us as we played, ready for another shopping mall or similar) and English corner tonight, I've lots to be getting on with.

The talks from Strings 2007 (see previous posts for links) are coming online and they are good quality recordings on the whole.

A few quick photos from Tsinghua gardens from the weekend where I sat and worked on Saturday in the sun, overlooking the lily ponds.



Just a selection from those on my Flickr site.

String blogging

Jacques Distler is currently blogging from Strings 2007. If anyone knows of other stringy bloggers then please let me know and I'll add them to the list.

Videos still to come.

Strings '07

Strings 2007 starts today in Madrid. The videos from the week of talks on the year's progress should be available online, linked from this page.

It was pointed out last year the importance of keeping close connections between the experimental community so that those working in the many interesting but often deeply theoretical aspects of string theory do not lose sight of the ultimate goal of science.
The first talk this year is on 'Status and prospects of the LHC machine and experiments'. (Schedule here).

With some interesting and appropriate timing Witten has today released his long awaited paper on three dimensional gravity. I look forward to watching this talk in particular but the others which are of particular interest to me are Beisert on 'strong/weak interpolation in the spectrum of AdS/CFT', Kallosh on 'testing string theory with the CMB', Bern on 'the UV finiteness of N=8 SUGRA' and Sugimoto on 'baryons from instantons in holographic QCD', though there's lots more of interest besides.

Besides Witten's paper today there is the pre-print 'Quark Mass in the Sakai-Sugimoto Model of Chiral Symmetry Breaking' From Evans and Threlfall where it is claimed that by studying the rotations around the vacuum manifold in a holographic model of QCD the goldstone mode studied in the original Sakai-Sugimoto model is not the correct physical state and that the original formulation which only includes massless quarks can be extended simply to incorporate massive fundamental matter and a massive pseudo-goldstone boson. The similarity of the quark bilinear condensate as a function of quark mass compared to the form in the non-supersymmetric D3/D7 cases with non-constant dilaton is interesting and it looks like there is more to explore here, especially in looking for agreement with the Gellmann-Oakes-Renner relation.

The weekend has been enjoyable and there's plenty to write up when I have a chance.