Masanori Hanada gave a talk today (Thursday 9 September) to the “Dual Mystery Channel of Gauge and Gravity“, an online seminar and journal club hosted by string theorists at IIT Madras. The title of Masanori‘s talk was “Confinement/deconfinement transition in the D0-brane matrix model — A signature of M-theory?” A link to the site with abstract is here. The talk was based on a paper in preparation. Since late 1990s, it has been expected that the D0-brane matrix model can describe type IIA superstring theory and M-theory. Evidence has emerged that type IIA superstring is actually described by this model, but the connection to M-theory has been less clear. Recently Masanori and collaborations have found a new phase in this matrix model which is, at least qualitatively, consistent with M-theory.