The main purpose of this talk is to describe, by way of concrete examples, how the field of numerical relativity now contributes to our understanding of open questions in heavy-ion physics and gravitational collapse. I will begin by motivating these studies in terms of the physical systems that they are intended to clarify, and I will provide specific examples of how to describe these systems with numerical simulations of asymptotically AdS spacetimes in the fully non-linear regime of general relativity.

The theory of General Relativity represents a shift in perspective that allows us to see spacetime as geometry, along with the set of rules that tells us how this geometry behaves. In this lecture, I will start with the concept of spacetime as conceived in this theory, and I will lead you through some of its implications until we come to focus on one in particular: the black hole. It is the recent observational evidence for these black holes that have initiated a new channel in astronomy, and it has begun to give us a glimpse into previously inaccessible regions of the universe.

Fifty years ago, the Italian physicist Gabriele Veneziano pioneered string theory. In his talk for the general audience, he will tell the story and will explain the basics of this fundamental model in the modern physics. Real time translation from English will be provided.

I will review (for non experts) some recent results on gravitational radiation from transplanckian-energy collisions at small deflection angle ${\theta }_{\mathrm{E}}\sim \; 4G\sqrt{s}/b$ and in particular: i) the zero-frequency limit; ii) some logarithmically enhanced corrections to it; iii) an unexpected bump in the spectrum around ωb = 1; iv) a break in the spectrum at the Hawking-temperature scale $\hslash /G\sqrt{s}$

IGFAE organizes a Science week (Semana da ciencia) from 12th to 16th November 2018. It will include various outreach and educational events in Santiago de Compostela. More information on each of them is given below.

In recent years, there have been important advances in understanding the far-from-equilibrium dynamics in different physical systems including ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions and experiments with ultra-cold atoms. Hereby, a combination of classical-statistical lattice simulations and kinetic techniques is often used to address their non-equilibrium dynamics. In this talk, we will discuss typical phenomena and some phenomenologically relevant open questions of the far-from-equilibrium dynamics in these systems. A new numerical method to extract the spectral function non-perturbatively will also be presented. It is a particularly promising tool to address these questions and to improve our understanding of phenomena far from thermal equilibrium.

Holography is a calculation tool to explore the strongly coupled regime of gauge theories. It fits naturally into some problems related to quark and gluon dynamics under extreme conditions, both in and out of equilibrium. The ease at which results like the smallness of eta/s or fastness of thermalisation arise, seem to point out to an advantageous choice of variables. Still, a lot of work needs to be done in order to go beyond qualitative achievements. In this workshop, we will discuss progress that has been made in recent years in the formulation of realistic models that one can find all over the phase diagram of QCD: high temperature and/or high density regimes, phase transitions, jet quenching, chiral magnetic effect, etc. Also attention will be payed to methods that are being developed to tackle specific problems: semi-holography, numerical relativity, etc.