We will not have an external speaker this Friday. Instead, Haifeng and Albert will review and lead a discussion about recent/ongoing work on interpreting the "Polchinski phase" in de Sitter.

Some references:

• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0370269389903870 by Joe Polchinski
• https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14014 by Juan Maldacena
• https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.17912 by Albert Law