Month: March 2014

My latest work titled “The Geroch group in Einstein spaces” has appeared in http://arxiv.org/pdf/1403.6511.pdf.

Together with R. G. Leigh, M. Petropoulos and P. Tripathy, we have studied how the presence of a cosmological constant modifies the well-known Geroch solution generating technique and its integrability properties. Remarkably, the cosmological constant enters as a constant shift in the Hamiltonian, hence it does not modify the equations of motion neither the integrability properties of the sigma model. It does break, however, the part of SL(2,R) that interchanges the mass and the nut charge. This means that these two constants of motion are not interchangeable under a canonical transformation and hence the the gravitational “electric-magnetic” duality is lost. Nevertheless, perhaps surprisingly our results show that the Schwarzchild-AdS and Taub-NUT-AdS  solutions emerge from the Geroch technique and hence they are related t each other.

The ARISTEIA II grant “Aspects of Three-Dimensionsl CFTs” will fund a postdoc position starting as early as May 2014 and running until the end of the program. Interested candidates working in three-dimensional CFTs in the context of AdS/CFT, AdS/CMT and Higher-Spin Gauge Theories should send a CV and the names of  three referees to petkou@physics.auth.gr. The application deadline is 27th of April 2014.

The ARISTEIA II grant “Aspects of Three-Dimensionsl CFTs” will fund a PhD student from April 2014 to July 2015. The incumbents are expected to do research, leading to a PhD degree, in three-dimensional CFTs in the context of AdS/CFT, AdS/CMT and Higher-Spin Gauge Theories. Interested candidates should send a CV and the names of three referees to petkou@physics.auth.gr. The application deadline is 7th of April 2014.

From the 5th of March 2014 I am coordinating the grant “Aspects of three-dimensional CFTs”, funded from the Greek Secretariat of Research and Technology under the program “ARISTEIA II”.

The grant will run until the 31st of July 2015.

The grant will fund a one-year postdoc position, one PhD student, a number of research visits to the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Thessaloniki, the research travel of the local group members and Workshop on CFTs in the Spring-Summer of 2015.