Today was dedicated to topics and issues related to finite temperature and density. The first speaker of the morning was Prasad Hegde, who talked about the QCD phase diagram. While the general shape of the Columbia plot seems to be fairly well-established, there is now a lot of controversy over the details. For example, the two-flavour chiral limit seems to be well-described by either the O(4) or O(2) universality class, it isn't currently possible to exclude that it might be Z(2), and while the three-flavour transition appears to be known to be Z(2), simulations with staggered and Wilson quarks give disagreeing results for its features. Another topic that gets a lot of attention is the question of U(1)A restoration; of course, U(1)A is broken by the axial anomaly, which arises from the path integral measure and is present at all temperatures, so it cannot be expected to be restored in the same sense that chiral symmetry is, but it might be that as the temperature gets larger, the influence of the anomaly on the Dirac eigenvalue spectrum gets outvoted by the temporal boundary conditions, so that the symmetry violation might disappear from the correlation functions of interest. However, numerical studies using domain-wall fermions suggest that this is not the case. Finally, the equation of state can be obtained from stout or HISQ smearing with very similar results and appears well-described by a hadron resonance gas at low T, and to match reasonably well to perturbation theory at high T.
The next speaker was Saumen Datta speaking on studies of the QCD plasma using lattice correlators. While the short time extent of finite-temperature lattices makes it hard to say much about the spectrum without the use of techniques such as the Maximum Entropy Method, correlators in the spatial directions can be readily used to obtain screening masses. Studies of the spectral function of bottomonium in the Fermilab formalism suggest that the Y(1S) survives up to at least twice the critical temperature.
Sorendu Gupta spoke next about the equation of state in dense QCD. Using the Taylor expansion (which was apparently first invented in the 14th-15th century by the Indian mathematician Madhava) method together with Padé approximants to reconstruct the function from the truncated series, it is found that the statistical errors on the reconstruction blow up as one nears the suspected critical point. This can be understood as a specific instance of the "no-free-lunch theorem", because a direct simulation (were it possible) would suffer from critical slowing down as the critical point is approached, which would likewise lead to large statistical errors from a fixed number of configurations.
The last talk before lunch was Bastian Brandt with an investigation of an alternative formulation of pure gauge theory using auxiliary bosonic fields in an attempt to render the QCD action amenable to a dual description that might allow to avoid the sign problem at finite baryon chemical potential. The alternative formulation appears to describe exactly the same physics as the standard Wilson gauge action at least for SU(2) in 3D, and in 2D and/or in certain limits, its a continuum limit is in fact known to be Yang-Mills theory. However, when fermions are introduced, the dual formulation still suffers from a sign problem, but it is hoped that any trick that might avoid this sign problem would then also avoid the finite-μ one.
After lunch, there were two non-lattice talks. The first one was given by Gautam Mandal, who spoke about thermalisation in integrable models and conformal field theories. In CFTs, it can be shown that for certain initial states, the expectation value of an operator equilibrates to a certain "thermal" expectation value, and a generalisation to integrable models, where the "thermal" density operator includes chemical potentials for all (infinitely many) conserved charges, can also be given.
The last talk of the day was a very lively presentation of the fluid-gravity correspondence by Shiraz Minwalla, who described how gravity in Anti-deSitter space asymptotically goes over to Navier-Stokes hydrodynamics in some sense.
In the evening, the conference banquet took place on the roof terrace of a very nice restaurant serving very good European-inspired cuisine and Indian red wine (also rather nice -- apparently the art of winemaking has recently been adapted to the Indian climate, e.g. the growing season is during the cool season, and this seems to work quite well).
