The school will feature four block lectures 2 x 90 min, given by internationally recognized theoretical physicists, covering cutting-edge research topics centred on recent advances in the theory and phenomenology of QCD under extreme conditions, providing an in-depth review of these fields for PhD students before the XQCD conference.
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Diffusion models for lattice field theory
Lecturer: Prof. Gert Aarts (Swansea University)
Diffusion models are a widely used method in generative AI to produce images and videos. I will discuss the application to lattice field theory and discuss connections with methods known from theoretical physics, such as stochastic differential equations and stochastic quantisation. Applications to scalar and gauge theories are presented.
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What can we learn about QCD and related physics from astrophysical observations?
Lecturer: Prof. Kenji Fukushima (University of Tokyo)
I will explain the links between astrophysical observations and QCD-related physics in a pedagogical way. I will emphasize the constraints on the QCD equation of state but also talk about the magnetic fields and polarized x-ray measurements as well as the universality relations involving rotation.
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Non-equilibrium and Open Quantum Systems
Lecturer: Prof. Alexander Rothkopf (Korea University)
The study of nuclear matter under extreme conditions is often performed in systems away from thermal equilibrium, be it in the violent collisions of heavy nuclei or the mergers of neutron stars. In addition we need efficient probes to interrogate nuclear matter under such extreme conditions. I.e. we must find quantum systems that are susceptible to a nuclear or quark matter environment and which are able to make that recorded information accessible to experiment. Probes that are out of equilibrium with their environment, such as jets or heavy quarkonia play an important role in this regard. In this set of lectures we give a brief introduction to the Schwinger-Keldysh in-in formalism, which allows us to describe quantum systems out of equilibrium and their dynamical evolution. With the SK formalism in hand we will explore the simplest scenario of a heavy non-equilibrium probe in a thermal environment, based on the classic Caldeira-Leggett model.
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Fundamentals of Lattice QCD Simulations and Nucleon Structure
Lecturer: Prof. Sungwoo Park (Sejong University)
Lattice QCD is a first-principles, nonperturbative approach to studying the strong interaction through numerical evaluation of the QCD path integral. This pedagogical lecture will introduce the basic formulation of QCD on a Euclidean spacetime lattice and explain how physical observables are extracted from gauge-field ensembles. Starting from simple gluonic observables such as Wilson loops and the Polyakov loop, I will illustrate how lattice calculations probe confinement and related properties of QCD. I will then discuss how hadron masses are obtained from correlation functions and introduce the basic idea behind hadronic matrix-element calculations, with examples relevant to nucleon structure. The goal is to give students a broad and concrete picture of what lattice QCD computes and how it provides nonperturbative insight into QCD phenomena, from hadron physics to systems under extreme conditions.