物理科学学院 Physics

On 15th May, it was announced that Associate Professor Tian Yu of the GUCAS School of Physical Sciences, along with collaborators Wu Xiao-Ning (CAS Institute of Mathematics) and Zhang Hongbao (University of Crete, Greece), won an honorable mention in the 2012 Gravity Research Foundation essay competition, for their paper entitled “Poor Man’s Holography: How Far Can It Go?”

The Gravity Research Foundation’s annual essay competition has been held for 64 successive years and is one of the most prestigious international prizes in gravitational and gravity-related research. Particularly in recent years, the scope of the competition has expanded to include field theory, superstring theory, cosmology, relativistic astrophysics and so on. Leading experts such as J.D. Bekenstein, F. Wilczek, R. Wald, T. Jacobson, G. Ellis, L. Smolin, C. Rovelli, U. Das, T. Banks and E. Newman are frequent annual participants.

The paper submitted by Tian Yu and his collaborators is the only paper from China to have received a mention in the last three years. (A Chinese research paper has not been awarded any of the top five prizes for the last ten years). Dr. Tian’s paper is a systematic study of holographic correspondence between gravity in bulk space-time and quantum field theory on the boundary, in particular proving consistency between entropy produced in transport processes in non-equilibrium boundary systems and entropy gain by black holes in bulk space-time. An important example of this type of holographic correspondence relation is the so-called AdS space-time / conformal field theory (CFT) correspondence, which has been a hot topic in the world of theoretical physics for over ten years. This unites a host of seemingly disparate disciplines - thermal physics, fluid dynamics, condensed matter physics, particle physics, quantum gravity and superstring theory, quantum informatics and so on, smashing the traditional way of differentiating different fields of physics by scale or energy. This work by Tian Yu and his colleagues shows that this kind of holographic correspondence framework can far surpass standard AdS / CFT correspondence, opening up possibilities for a much broader and more general research framework.