NITheCS Focus Area Workshop: “Decoding the Universe: Quantum Gravity and Quantum Fields”

16 Jul 2025, 08:00 → 18 Jul 2025, 17:00 Africa/Johannesburg

 

 

 

NITheCS supports a range of Focus Areas that reflect its commitment to advancing research and collaboration in the theoretical and computational sciences. These thematic hubs unite researchers, students, and institutions working on shared challenges – from fundamental physics and cosmology to data science, mathematics, and interdisciplinary applications. Through workshops, seminars, and collaborative initiatives, the Focus Areas stimulate knowledge exchange and innovation to drive research impact in South Africa and beyond.

ABOUT THE WORKSHOP
This workshop will bring together NITheCS Associates engaged in, or deeply interested in, cutting-edge theoretical physics. Participants will explore recent advances in quantum gravity, quantum field theory, and their intersections. Through an exciting programme of talks, discussions, and collaborative sessions, the event aims to spark dialogue, deepen understanding, and inspire new research directions in the pursuit of fundamental knowledge about the universe.

Organisers:

• Dr Shajid Haque (University of Cape Town)
• Prof Vishnu Jejjala (University of the Witwatersrand)
• Prof Costas Zoubos (University of Pretoria)

 

Apply for the workshop  here

 

 

2025-07-16 NITheCS Focus Area Workshop.pdf

Wednesday 16 July

10:00 → 12:30 Day 1

10:00 Welcome and opening of Workshop

Speaker: Francesco Petruccione (NITheCS)

10:20 Complexity measures in holography

Complexity measures such as Nielsen and Krylov complexity have received much attention in recent years especially in the context of many-body quantum systems. One of the main reasons for its rise in popularity, however, is in the context of the holographic description of black holes. By using collective field theory, which provides a constructive way to map quantum theories to their gravitational duals, one may hope to make the holographic interpretation of these different measures precise.

Speaker: Jaco van Zyl

10:40 Quantum applications in material design and discovery

Quantum computing is an emerging technology that has the potential to speed various computer operations required in material science and characterization. The application of quantum computing in computational chemistry and material science allows us to solve issues that are unsolvable with classical computers.The session will provide insight into how quantum-centric supercomputing might assist address a crucial computational problem in material science.

Speaker: David Tshwane

11:00 Tea break

11:30 Quantum phases beyond classical shadows: A new framework for gravitational wave effects

This talk presents a theoretical paradigm exploring how low-frequency gravitational waves can induce uniquely quantum geometric phases—without classical counterparts—in mesoscopic optomechanical systems. Moving beyond usual Berry-type geometric phase analyses, we introduce a framework where an Aharonov–Bohm–like
phase arises from cyclic evolution in the quantum Hamiltonian’s parameter space. We propose a Ramsey-type interferometric scheme to theoretically extract these phases and discuss how such phase structures may encode spacetime curvature, even when classical observables remain trivial. The broader objective is to develop a quantum-coherent model of GWs-induced phase memory, opening new avenues at the intersection of gravitational physics and quantum systems. I welcome feedback and collaboration, including extensions involving gravitons or decoherence effects.

Speaker: Partha Nandi

11:50 Integrable structures (and beyond) in supersymmetric gauge theory

The link between the planar spectrum of 4d conformal field theories and integrable systems (both classical and quantum) has had far-reaching implications for the understanding of gauge theory more generally. However, much of this intuition has come from the study of the most supersymmetric case, which is therefore highly unrealistic. I will argue that there is a lot to be learnt by looking at less supersymmetric theories, such as marginal deformations and orbifolds, where integrability is generically lost but one still finds interesting statistical models appearing, as well as symmetry structures that are not naively visible. I will outline several directions where progress is possible as well as the physical and mathematical tools that are expected to play a role in future developments.

Speaker: Costas Zoubos (University of Pretoria)

12:10 The future of mathematical discovery

I speculate on how we will be doing mathematics and formal theory in the next 10–20 years and discuss what we should do in the near term to prepare

Speaker: Vishnu Jejjala

12:30 → 14:30 Lunch

14:30 → 15:30 Structured Discussions

Speaker: All morning Speakers

15:30 → 18:00 Coffee break and Discussions

Thursday 17 July

10:00 → 12:20 Day 2

10:00 Quantum corrections to the density of states of near-extremal black holes

Recent work by Turiaci, Iliesiu, and others has identified quantum corrections to the density of states of near-extremal black holes. These corrections have significant implications for our understanding of black-hole physics (and physics of strongly interacting QFT) in the very-low-temperature regime. In this talk, I will present the latest findings and outline some directions for future research.

Speaker: Suman Das

10:20 Holography from the lattice

I will discuss how lattice techniques can be used to explore simple quantum field theories that are relevant to holography. By focusing on lower-dimensional models with strong coupling and large N limits, such as matrix quantum mechanics, supersymmetric gauge theories, and scalar models with emergent geometry, we can probe aspects of holography from first principles. The aim is to identify minimal setups where lattice simulations yield insight into quantum gravity, black hole dynamics, and the emergence of spacetime, and to open the floor for potential collaborations across theory, numerics, and formal holography.

Speaker: Anosh Joseph

10:40 Centres of symmetric group algebras in gauge string duality

The study of half-BPS states of dimension n in N = 4 super-Yang Mills theory with U (N ) gauge group has motivated the study of interesting subsets of conjugacy classes of the symmetric group which multiplicatively generate the centre of the symmetric group algebra. In this talk, I will outline some current and future developments in the study of structural properties of this algebra.

Speaker: Garry Kemp

11:00 Coffee Break

11:30 Quantum field theory in small systems

Recent advances in results from high-energy QCD and AMO suggest that non-trivial, many-body dynamics emerge at astonishingly low numbers of particles and in systems of shockingly small size. My group has been and will continue to think about the theoretical predictions for such systems nominally so far away from the thermodynamic limit.

Speaker: Will Horowitz

11:50 AdS/CFT, string theory, and black holes”

Currently I am looking at what we can learn about QFT in de Sitter space by embedding it as a boundary CFT in AdS, features of black hole attractors that have been heated up and Spindle solutions in SUGRA and their holography.

Speaker: Kevin Goldstein

12:30 → 14:30 Lunch

14:30 → 15:30 Structured Discussions

Speaker: All morning Speakers

16:00 → 16:30 Public Talk 1: The Physics of a Trillion Degrees

A microsecond after the Big Bang, all of space existed at a trillion degrees, one hundred thousand times hotter than the center of the sun. 13.8 billion years later, massive collaborations of thousands of scientists recreate these conditions of the early universe thousands of times a second in one of the most expensive and complicated science experiments ever attempted. In this talk I provide a general introduction to the physics explored in these Little Bangs, ephemeral fireballs that--during their lifetimes of less than a billionth of a trillionth of a second--are droplets of the hottest, most perfect fluid in the universe.

Speaker: Will Horowitz

16:30 → 17:00 Public Talk 2: The centenary of the Schrödinger equation and quantum theory.

Speaker: Kevin Goldstein

17:00 → 17:45 Q & A

19:00 → 21:00 Workshop Dinner

Friday 18 July

10:00 → 12:10 Day 3

10:00 Jet energy-loss in the OO-era

As I write this, the LHC is running proton-Oxygen and Oxygen-Oxygen collisions for the first time. These experiments will give unprecedented control over small droplets of QGP that are notoriously plagued by biases in heavy-ion collisions. In the near future we will be extending our analytical studies of jet quenching in small systems, as well as producing predictions for quenching in OO using cutting edge Monte Carlo simulations

Speaker: Isobel Kolbé

10:20 Holography, chaos, and quantum information

A quick overview of some ideas I plan to explore around holography, quantum information, and maybe a bit of machine learning.

Speaker: Pallab Basu

10:40 Renyi refined quantum null energy condition and its holographic implications

The quantum null energy condition (QNEC) is a quantum field theoretic realization of Landauer’s proclamation that information is physical. QNEC imposes a lower bound on the energy in a region in terms of the information contained in the complement of that region. In this talk I will describe ongoing attempts to rigorously prove a Renyi refinement of the QNEC and understand its implications on holographic spacetime.

Speaker: Tanay Kibe

11:00 Coffe Break

11:30 de Sitter physics via AdS/(B)CFT

Expectation value of simple massive fields on a de Sitter spacetime can be computed using a) embedding of codimension one de Sitter spacetime in a Anti de-Sitter spacetime and b) the AdS/CFT dictionary. I will talk about connections of these techniques with boundary conformal field theory with a spacelike boundary

Speaker: Adwait Gaikwad

11:50 Integrability of open strings ending on D7 branes

Integrability of open strings ending on D7 branes is an interesting problem because one can consider two distinct embeddings, S2 ×S2 or S4. The more symmetric case has been shown to be suggestive of integrability in previous works in the gauge theory, whilst the opposite is true for the S2s. For simple solutions, analytic non-integrability techniques have been applied to both cases, but have shown that these cases seem to sit in some integrable class of solutions. One could try and set up a more complicated problem and use the same techniques to find evidence of non-integrability, which doesn’t seem to be straightforward or perhaps there are other methods one can explore to confirm the gauge theory results.

Speaker: Laila Tribelhorn

12:10 → 14:30 Lunch

14:30 → 15:30 Structured discussions

Speaker: All morning Speakers

15:30 → 16:30 Coffee break and discussions