The study of thermalization has become an especially hot topic of research in the past several years, and there are multiple advanced workshops on the subject. However, these have been aimed at experts in the field. There is a clear need for an instructional program targeted at educating junior researchers across the disciplines including statistical mechanics, hard and soft condensed-matter physics, biophysics, nuclear physics, string theory, and quantum information theory. This program, in the format of a school, aims at promoting an intensive discussion of thermalization ranging from its conceptual foundations to modern-day applications in complex condensed matter systems, quantum information theory, and string theory. Such a school will serve multiple purposes. First, it will train a cohort of junior researchers to approach the open problems in the field from an interdisciplinary perspective. Second, by bringing together speakers and researchers who work on various aspects of thermalization, it will accelerate progress in our understanding of the subject by consolidating knowledge across different disciplines.
The school is partitioned into the following six modules:
- Fundamentals of Classical Equilibration
- Fluctuations and Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics
- Broken Ergodicity and Glassy Dynamics
- Quantum Information and Thermalization
- Quantum Ergodicity and Quantum Quenches
- Holography and Equilibration
The primary pedagogical activities of the school will be lectures, a subsequent tutorial, and lunch discussions among smaller groups. Each lecturer will present three lectures. Two of these will be extended blackboard talks that give the participants the basic tools of the theoretical framework at hand. A third talk will be in the form of a short informal seminar that will aim to give a pedagogical presentation of the current research activities in the field, followed by a question-and-answer period of length comparable to the seminar itself.
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