By Professor Tom Kibble FRS and Professor George Pickett FRS
The meeting aims to bring together physicists from the very different disciplines of condensed matter physics and cosmology/astrophysics to exploit the remarkable correspondences emerging between processes and mechanisms on hugely different scales. Motion in a condensate mimics motion in a curved space-time metric; quantized vortices mimic cosmic strings; coherent phase boundaries mimic branes; there are partial analogues of black holes and some features of neutron stars. Condensed matter processes in the laboratory can provide insight into inaccessible cosmological processes and the violent transitions in the early Universe have in turn generated interest into rapid transits of analogous phase transitions in condensed matter.
Invited speakers include: Professor James Anglin, Dr Yuriy Bunkov, Professor Anne Davis, Dr Richard Haley, Professor Matti Krusius, Dr Ulf Leonhardt, Professor Ray Rivers, Professor Joseph Polchinski, Dr Emil Polturak, Dr Ralf Schützhold, Dr William Unruh, Dr Mairi Sekellariadou, Professor Tanmay Vachaspati, Professor Joe Vinen, Professor Grigoriy Volovik and Dr Wojciech Zurek.