Name	Affiliation	Title and abstract	Files
Robert Jaffe	MIT	Casimir Physics After discussing what is meant by the title, I describe some recent developments at both the mesoscopic and particle physics energy scales
Herbert Neuberger	Rutgers	Planar QCD: news from the lattice front Analytical and numerical methods of lattice field theory have established several facts about planar QCD that might eventually help determine a string equivalent: (1) Euclidean planar QCD on an l^4 lattice is l-independent for l > l_c. (2) Chiral symmetry breaks spontaneously by a random matrix mechanism. (3) The pion mass squared is well described by a parabola in quark mass.
Leon Takhtajan	Stony Brook	Faddeev-Popov ghosts, holomorphic factorization of Laplacians on Riemann surfaces, and higher genus generalization of Kronecker's first limit formula We give an explicit and precise formulation of the factorization of the bosonic string effective action in terms of Faddeev-Popov ghosts. It is based on a new holomorphic factorization formula for determinants of Laplace operators on Riemann surfaces of genus g>1, which generalizes the classical Kronecker's first limit formula when g=1. This is a joint work with A. McIntyre, math.CV/0410294 (to appear in GAFA).
Thomas Mohaupt	Friedrich-Schiller Univ., Jena	Black hole entropy: beyond the area law. In the presence of higher curvature terms, the area law for the black hole entropy needs to be modified, in order that the first law of black hole mechanics remains valid. The resulting subleading corrections to the black hole entropy agree with the subleading corrections of the statistical entropy predicted by string theory. Recently, this observation has been the starting points for various new developments, which, for example,  link the black hole entropy to the partition function of topological string theory. We give an overview of both old and new results on this topic.
Siddhartha Sen	TCD	Geometric Finiteness and Quasinormal Modes The BTZ Black Hole appears near the event horizon of many String Theory Black Holes. It was shown that the BTZ Black Hole is geometrically finite. This is a propert that a hyberbolic three manifold can have. A consequence of this property is that there is a one to one correspondence between the three geometry of the BTZ Black Hole and the Teichmuller space of its boundary two manifold. This property is a consequence of a theorem due to Sullivan. By using this result a ADS/CFT result follows from an examination of quasinormal modes of a scalar field in the BTZ background geometry. The talk will outline these ideas
Luke Drury	DIAS	Informal talk: Hamilton in Dunsink William Rowan Hamilton was Andrews' Professor of Astronomy in Trinity College and Royal Astronomer of Ireland from 1827 until his death. He resided at Dunsink Observatory, which now constitutes part of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.