Speaker
Description
Understanding the dynamics of first-order thermal deconfinement–confinement transitions in strongly coupled gauge theories is an open problem that has been studied from various perspectives, including supersymmetry, holography, and explicit lattice computations—each approach revealing a different aspect of the transition. In addition to their theoretical interest, such transitions are also phenomenologically relevant, as they may leave behind potentially detectable relics, such as gravitational waves and dark matter abundance. Motivated by these phenomenological implications, in this talk, I will discuss progress in understanding one aspect of these transitions, namely, supercooling. Using explicit examples and a general holographic argument, we will see that the maximum possible supercooling in such theories is closely related to the degree of conformality of the theory near the critical temperature.