Time flies. My four weeks in the US ended, with quite fruiteful results of research. Well, all of them are still in progress, but the visits to KITP and Madison were very fruiteful. I am going to miss my friends…. though I can have discussions with them on skype.
On my last day in KITP, I gave a seminar. I felt honored in fact, and I felt really happy for the fact that I could talk on my research results in front of briliant workshop participants who came from all over the world. Just before my seminar, to make myself relaxed, I walked out of the KITP building, to see the oscean. The moment was so wonderful. Pelicans flied just over my head, along the sea cliff. It was stunningly beautiful.
I started talking on my dream of the project, because the KITP has such a nice environment for research that it is what I think any physicist should have dreamed to visit. My dream is to describe nuclear physics by string theory. I have some proposals, and I talked a little about it in my seminar, but the whole subject of my seminar is a derivation of nuclear force by holographic QCD. I got interesting questions, and if you are interested in this subject, you can access to the video of the talk, provided in KITP web cite. I’ve got many questions, and in particular the ones by David were instructive. His questions, in particular the ones after the seminar, were important ones to which I don’t have a confident answer since I haven’t computed it yet. I have a good discussion with him and Joe, and other members, I enjoyed discussions very much.
That Thursday was my last day at KITP, since on the next day I visited Caltech for a day. Since Caltech is just two-hour-drive away from KITP, I just wanted to see Ooguri-san there to have discussions. I was allowed to give a seminar there, so I talked about the same subject. He gave one crucial question during the seminar, about the approximation which we made for getting the nuclear force at short range. Unfortunately I had to leave Caltech earlier than I scheduled, because of Jesusita fire threatening the whole area of Santa Barbara on that day (My car was covered by its ash, and we could see the flame on the mountain from KITP, that was scary… and fortunately, our apartment was not included into the mandatory evacuation area). So I didn’t have enough time for discussions after the seminar, but it was very nice to visit Caltech again.
On the next day, I moved to Madison, University of Wisconsin. My seminar there was on “holographic nuclei” which I proposed for a gravity dual of heavy nuclei. I had a lot of discussions every day with Aki, Allen and Peter, thanks to their interest. It was very nice that we could figure out possible concrete computations for an important concept in holographic QCD. We shall see whether this approach works well or not.
Before I came to the US, I had a very vague thoghts on many things. Various idears were floating in my head, and I couldn’t figure out which one is important, which one is realizable, which one is computable. After discussions with friends in KITP and Madison, I could come to a stage at which many things are clear. Some of the ideas seem to be already dead, some have survived, some have been very much developped. And what is nice is that priprities of the ideas are now clear to me, thanks to my friends. Now I need to sit down and calculate, with equations at hand. This trip was one of the best trips I have had, I saw many friends and had good discussions, and came back to Japan with definite directions of research. I hope to experience such a trip again in the near future.
