Carrollian physics appeared for the first time out of a mathematical curiosity in a work of Lévy-Leblond: what if, instead of taking the usual non-relativistic limit of the Poincaré group where the speed of light c is taken to ∞, one considers the opposite limit, namely c→0? While the first limit gives rise to the familiar Galilean group, the second leads to the so-called Carroll group. In a Carrollian limit (c→0), the lightcones collapse along the time axis, which means that particles can no longer move and two spacetime events are causally disconnected. This absence of causality, as well as arbitrarinesses of time intervals, reminded Lévy-Leblond of Lewis Carroll's book Through the looking-glass, which is the origin for the name of this ultralocal limit of the Poincaré group.
While such spacetimes seem a priori to be too strange to be of any physical relevance, there has been recently a surge of interest in Carrollian physics. It is quite a remarkable fact that, indeed, Carrollian physics naturally appear in the context of the geometry of null surfaces and the associated Bondi-Metzner-Sachs symmetries, but also black hole horizons, inflationary cosmology, fluid/gravity and holographic correspondences, as well as limits of Einstein gravity.
The ESI programme is expected to foster further progress on the following developments:
While there are interesting interplays between all aspects, we aim to concentrate activities as follows:
A rough schedule of the program is as follows:
Coming soon.
Organizers
Name | Affiliation |
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Andrea Campoleoni | University of Mons |
Pedro del Real Lavergne | University of Vienna |
Laura Donnay | SISSA |
Adrien Fiorucci | Technical University of Vienna |
Stefan Fredenhagen | University of Vienna |
Daniel Grumiller | Technical University of Vienna |
Stefan Prohazka | University of Vienna |
Attendees
Name | Affiliation |
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Ankit Aggarwal | Technical University of Vienna |
Jay Armas | University of Amsterdam |
Glenn Barnich | Free University of Brussels |
Eric Bergshoeff | University of Groningen |
Bin Chen | Peking University |
Luca Ciambelli | Free University of Brussels |
Claudio Dappiaggi | University of Pavia |
José Figueroa-O'Farrill | University of Edinburgh |
Marc Henneaux | Collège de France |
Yannick Herfray | University of Tours |
Rob Leigh | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
Sucheta Majumdar | Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon |
Luciano Montecchio | Technical University of Vienna |
Gerben Oling | University of Edinburgh |
Simon Pekar | Ecole Polytechnique |
Alfredo Perez | Centro de Estudios Cientificos |
Anastasios Petkou | Aristotle University |
Daniele Pranzetti | University of Udine |
Romain Ruzziconi | University of Oxford |
Stephan Stieberger | Max Planck Institute for Physics |
Juan A. Valiente Kroon | Queen Mary University of London |