158. Young Researchers Conference at Perimeter Institute

… has finished several weeks ago, and all talks are now online at PIRSA. To my knowledge, the main purpose of the conference is to put together short listed candidates for postdoctoral positions at PI – an equivalent of interview with important difference that candidates show themselves to each other, interact with each other and accept questions from each other while discussing and presenting their work. At the same time, the hiring committee carefully makes important observations, orchestrates the whole process and decides. If you are a small graduate student, and you are interested to learn really well how the hiring process works, I strongly encourage you to watch as many talks from this conference as you can including discussion sections after talks.

Here are some talks that I was personally interested to listen to:

• Michael Kiemaier from MIT discusses on-shell methods in QFT. If you are not familiar with on-shell methods, you will be interested to hear his explanation when on-shell methods are more efficient than Feynman diagram calculus. If you are QFT geek, his discussion of MHV vertex expansion may be worth checking out.
• Arvind Murugan from Princeton University makes a presentation on 2+1 gauge theory-gravity duality. In particular, he discusses 2+1 dim Chern-Simons theories with reduced supersymmetry, that exhibit various interesting phenomena such as appearance of fractional statistics (Ervin, this might be interesting for you). Arvind also proposes a field theoretic dual for a long known vacuum of gauged supergravity on background.
• Louis Leblond from Texas A&M talks about tachyon mediated non-gaussianity. Namely, he discusses hybrid (that is why – “tachyon”) multifield inflationary models.
• Gonzalo Torroba discusses four-dimensional dynamics of string compactifications. In particular, he explains how to construct kinetic terms of the low energy degrees of freedom in 4-dim compactifications with strong warping.

At this point, the first round of offers has already passed, I wonder who is the winner?