Speaker
Mukund Rangamani (University of California, Davis, USA)
Date & Time
Thu, 14 December 2017, 14:30 to 15:30
Venue
Emmy Noether Seminar Room, ICTS Campus, Bangalore
Resources
Abstract
I will describe how techniques from topological field theory and equivariant cohomology find a role in physical problems. I will define the notion of thermal equivariance which will involve gauging thermal diffeomorphisms, and argue that these constructions naturally lead to entropy being interpretable as a Noether current. I will outline an application to constructing dissipative hydrodynamic effective actions, reproducing previously known facts about the admissible constitutive relations, and providing a prediction for the nature of hydrodynamic fluctuations.