Alkali-Polymer Flooding in an Austrian Brownfield: From Laboratory to Field-Insights.

We focus on optimizing oil displacement in brownfields using alkali polymers (AP) flooding. The goal is to enhance rock-fluid and fluid-fluid interactions to improve oil recovery. The evaluation includes detailed screening of AP mixtures to ensure cost-effectiveness and maximize chemical slug efficiency, using an AP pilot project in Austria as a case study.

Holographic thermalization at intermediate coupling.

We use the AdS/CFT conjecture to investigate the thermalization of large-N(c) N = 4 super Yang-Mills plasma in the limit of large but finite 't Hooft coupling. On the gravity side, we supplement the type IIB supergravity action by the full set of O(α('3)) operators, which enables us to derive O(λ(-3/2)) corrections to the emission spectrum of prompt photons in one model of holographic thermalization. Decreasing the coupling strength from the λ = ∞ limit, we observe a qualitative change in the way the photon spectral density approaches its thermal limit as a function of the photon energy.

Violation of the holographic viscosity bound in a strongly coupled anisotropic plasma.

We study the conductivity and shear viscosity tensors of a strongly coupled N=4 super-Yang-Mills plasma which is kept anisotropic by a θ parameter that depends linearly on one of the spatial dimensions. Its holographic dual is given by an anisotropic axion-dilaton-gravity background and has recently been proposed by Mateos and Trancanelli as a model for the preequilibrium stage of quark-gluon plasma in heavy-ion collisions. By applying the membrane paradigm which we also check by numerical evaluation of Kubo formula and lowest lying quasinormal modes, we find that the shear viscosity purely transverse to the direction of anisotropy saturates the holographic viscosity bound, whereas longitudinal shear viscosities are smaller, providing the first such example not involving higher-derivative theories of gravity and, more importantly, with fully known gauge-gravity correspondence.