Turbulence is an ubiquitous phenomenon in natural and industrial fluid flows. Yet, it still lacks a  satisfactory theoretical description. One of the main open issues is to calculate the statistical properties of the turbulent steady state, and in particular what is generically called intermittency effects, starting from the fundamental description of the fluid dynamics provided by Navier-Stokes equation. In this presentation, I will focus on isotropic and homogeneous turbulence in three-dimensional incompressible flows.

Old results and recent developments on the theoretical description of elementary particles with "continuous" spin will be reviewed. At free level, these fields are described by unitary irreducible representations of the isometry group (either Poincare or anti de Sitter group) with an infinite number of physical degrees of freedom per spacetime point. We will mention a list of new results, in particular on their cubic interactions, as well as important issues that remain open.

In the next few years, we are going to probe the low-redshift universe with unprecedented accuracy. Among the various fruits that this will bear, it will greatly improve our knowledge of the dynamics of dark energy. A particularly useful description of dark energy is through the Effective Field Theory of Dark Energy, which assumes that dark energy is the Goldstone boson of broken time translations. Such a formalism makes it easy to ensure that predicted signatures are consistent with well-established principles of physics.

In this seminar I will describe a holographic approach to QCD where 
conformal symmetry is broken explicitly in the UV by a relevant operator 
O. This operator maps to a five dimensional scalar field, the dilaton, 
with a massive term. Implementing also the IR constraint found by 
Gursoy, Kiritsis and Nitti, an approximate linear glueball spectrum is 
obtained which is consistent with lattice data. Finally, I will describe 
the evolution of the model parameters with the conformal dimension of O. 
This will suggest a map between the QCD anomaly and the trace anomaly of 

What is the holographic dual of an ordinary solid? Using insight from effective field theory (EFT), I will argue that an answer is provided by an SO(d) magnetic monopole in (d+1)-dimensional AdS space. We call such field configuration “solidon”. The low-energy spectrum of the boundary theory can be derived analytically from the gravity dual, and the result confirms that the effective theory consists of a set of phonons having dispersion relations that match those expected from EFT.