PHY552, NUCLEAR PHYSICS II, Fall 2007
Prof.Edward Shuryak
(office C139, phone 632-8127)

This is Home page of PHY552, http://dau2.physics.sunysb.edu/~shuryak/NPII_07/NPII_home.html

If you want e-mail me, please click here

Tu. 11-20 to 12-40AM, and Thu.10-10 to11-20

(note Thu time shift from the older ad),

C133 (not P119 as in Solar)


The main objective of the course is to introduce graduate students, both theorists and experimentalists, to nuclear/hadronic physics and its theory based on QCD. Unlike Nuclear Physics I (Phy551) which focused on basic knowledge about nuclei, this is more advanced course which deals with selected subjects related with structure of the QCD vacuum and hadrons, as well as finite temperature/density hadronic matter in relation to heavy ion physics at RHIC.
Pre-requisites: Grad. or undergrad general course on Particle/Nuclear physics; Phy551 and Statistical Mechanics desirable. No particular textbook exist as most material is current: materials be provided as handouts.

The particular topics to be discussed are also changed from earlier version: with more advanced students participating we move on to more advanced subjects this time.

  • The correlation functions, QCD sum rules and the nonperturbative scales
  • Topology, barriers and semiclassical tunneling in gauge theories -- the instantons
  • Instantons and light quarks: zero modes
  • Chiral symmetry breaking, NJL model and chiral scale
  • Instanton liquid model and chiral symmetry breaking
  • Instantons in supersymmetric theories: beta functions etc
  • Magnetic monopoles in gauge theories
  • Dual superconductor picture of confinement
  • QCD at finite T and mu: the phase diagram
  • Monopoles on the lattice and confinement/deconfinement
  • N=2 SYM and Seiberg-Witten work on dualities and monopoles
  • N=4 SYM in conformal and Higgs regimes
  • AdS/CFT correspondence
  • looking for gravity dual for QCD-like theories

    • Unlike NP-I, there is no written exam. There will be exercises, but most of the grade (2/3) will be be based on quality of a presentation students are supposed to make, based on recent research papers from a supplied list.