$T^3$ webinar*
Michele will entertain
us with "Holographic models of composite Higgs in the Veneziano limit"
https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.03003

*tea/coffee/biscuits break at your convenience time

If opinions spread by interactions between reasonable individuals, why is consensus hard to achieve? I present some idealized social dynamics models to understand this dichotomy between consensus and diversity. Consensus always arises in the voter model and its natural extensions. For the voter model, I'll discuss some basic features of the time to reach consensus. Diversity can arise when an individual may not be influenced by some of its neighbors. One such example is a 3-state voter model of leftists, centrists, and rightists, in which a centrist and an extremist influence each other but extremists of the opposite persuasion do not. Depending on the initial condition, the population may or may not reach consensus. In the bounded confidence model, I'll discuss how a population becomes increasingly fragmented as the political range of interaction of an individual decreases. A related phenomenon occurs in the voter model when individuals are also influenced by competing external news sources.

Note special time
Contact John Palmeri for Zoom meeting invitation

The flavour sector of the Standard Model is very well constrained by several measurements. However, why its structure is so peculiar is still an unresolved question. This becomes even more interesting in light if recent anomalies in B meson semileptonic decays.
In order to shed light on this interesting puzzle, the approaches that one can follow are mainly two: on the one hand, one might study the possibility that New Physics is the responsible; on the other hand, one can focus on better understanding predictions for hadronic quantities which are important in flavour processes.
I will review two recent developments regarding both approaches.

$T^3$ webinar*
Jean-Loïc will entertain
us with the "Renormalization group optimized perturbation at zero and finite temperature".

He will illustrate how the renormalization group optimized perturbation (RGOPT) resums perturbative expansions in vacuum
or thermal field theories. For zero-temperature QCD the non-perturbative quark condensate is calculated via the spectral density
of the Dirac operator, with good convergence properties exhibited from two-loop to five-loop orders. In thermal QCD the convergence
of thermodynamic quantities is drastically improved already from two-loop RGOPT as compared to standard thermal perturbation,
and it compares much better to lattice simulations. It also cures the bad renormalization scale dependence observed in other
resummation methods known as hard-thermal-loop (HTL) perturbation. If time allows, work in progress needed in gauge theories to go beyond present results will be sketched.
Based on J-L. Kneur, A. Neveu, Phys. Rev. D 101, 074009 https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.11670
J-L. Kneur, M.B. Pinto, T. Restrepo,
https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.08240
https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.02124
L. Fernandez, J-L. Kneur, M.B. Pinto, in preparation.
*tea/coffee/biscuits break at your convenience time

$T^3$ webinar*

Loïc will entertain us with "Cold & Dense QCD: Rernormalization Group Optimized Perturbation Theory improvement to Next-to-Next-to-Leading-Order"

*tea/coffee/biscuits break at your convenience time

Biologists have recently come to appreciate that eukaryotic cells are home to a multiplicity of non-membrane bound compartments, many of which form and dissolve as needed for the cell to function. These dynamical “condensates” enable many central cellular functions – from ribosome assembly, to RNA regulation and storage, to signaling and metabolism. While it is clear that these compartments represent a type of separated phase, what controls their formation, how specific biological components are included or excluded, and how these structures influence physiological and biochemical processes present many open questions. I will discuss recent experiments on phase separated condensates both engineered and natural, and will discuss a novel “magic number” effect relevant to the formation and control of two-component phase separated condensates.

Zoom meeting invitation will be communicated at a later time

We investigate the influence of non-local couplings on the torsional and bending elasticities of DNA. Such couplings have been observed in the past by several simulation studies. Here, we use a description of DNA conformations based on the variables tilt, roll and twist. Our analysis of both coarse-grained (oxDNA) and all-atom models indicates that these share strikingly similar features: there are strong off-site couplings for tilt-tilt and twist-twist, while they are much weaker in the roll-roll case. By developing an analytical framework to estimate bending and torsional persistence lengths in non-local DNA models, we show how off-site interactions generate a length scale dependent elasticity. Based on the simulation generated elasticity data the theory predicts a significant length scale dependent effect on torsional fluctuations, but only a modest effect on bending fluctuations. These results are in agreement with experiments probing DNA mechanics from single base pair to kilobase pair scales.

$T^3$ webinar*

Felix will entertain us with an introduction to Seiberg duality,
in two parts:

14:00 pre-time talk: "Superspace and superfields for N=1 SUSY in D=4", will be a rapid but pedagogical introduction to the superfield
formalism, to the extent that is needed to understand the notation for
the following talk. If you know supersymmetry, no need to attend.

15:00 tea-time talk: "The infrared structure of N=1 supersymmetric QCD"
This talk is an introduction to Seiberg duality in SU(N_c)
supersymmetric gauge theory with N_f fundamental flavours. It will start
with an overview of the different conjectured phases for different
values of N_f and N_c. We will then study the free magnetic phase in
some detail. Further possible topics are s-confinement, the
quantum-deformed moduli space, the interacting conformal phase or
metastable dynamical supersymmetry breaking.

*tea/coffee/biscuits break at your convenience time

$T^3$ webinar*

Rodrigo will entertain us with an introduction to Primordial Black Holes

*tea/coffee/biscuits break at your convenience time