Sabine Hossenfelder (NORDITA)

Minimal Length Scale Scenarios for Quantum Gravity

Is there a limit to how well we can resolve structures? In my talk I will look at the question whether nature features a fundamentally minimal length. I will summarize what indications we have from thought experiments and existing approaches to quantum gravity for the existence of a minimal length scale. And I will discuss how one can incorporate a minimal length into quantum mechanics and quantum field theory.

Nicolas Borghini (Bielefeld University)

String theory inspired approaches to heavy-ion collisions

Collisions between ultrarelativistic heavy nuclei in the laboratory lead to the formation of droplets of a hot soup of quarks and gluons, similar to the matter which filled the microseconds-old Universe. The properties of that soup are governed by the gauge theory of strong interactions, QCD, and should therefore be calculable within its framework. Yet the created droplets are highly dynamical, and to match their experimentally inferred properties with theoretical computations, it has proven fruitful to invoke ideas and methods stemming from string theory, in particular the gauge/gravity correspondence. After briefly introducing some features of high-energy heavy-ion collisions, I shall present a few examples of application of the correspondence to their description and to the characterization of the created medium.

Erminia Calabrese (University of Oxford)

Extracting cosmological informations from the Cosmic Microwave Background

Over the past few decades the quantity and the quality of CMB data increased significantly, allowing to obtain, from their analysis, very accurate constraints on theoretical speculations about the Universe content and evolution. In this presentation I will review the basic of CMB physics, going from theoretical models to delivered data and report recent results from the ACT and Planck experiments.