Description
Seminars of the Italian String Community.
For more information please contact Domenico Orlando or Alessandro Sfondrini.
I will talk about recent progress in analytic approaches to the conformal bootstrap.
I will introduce Mellin space as a convenient tool to perform both perturbative and nonperturbative computations in conformal field theories. I will discuss dispersion relations in Mellin space, the sum rules that they lead to, and applications thereof. These include the Wilson-Fisher model in d=4-eps...
In this talk I will briefly review the theory of Random Tensors. In the limit of large size (large N), random tensors exhibit a new "melonic" limit, simpler than the planar limit of random matrices but richer than the one of random vectors. This "not too complicated but not too trivial" situation is ideal for analytic computations. I will then discuss some applications of random tensors to...
The source-free Maxwell’s equations are both conformal invariant and invariant under an SO(2) electromagnetic duality group. It is commonly thought that these conditions imply their uniqueness. However, there are two interacting electrodynamics theories with the same field content and all the symmetries of Maxwell’s equations. One was found in 1983 by Bialynicki-Birula from a strong-field...
Quantum chaotic systems are often defined via the assertion that their spectral statistics coincides with, or is well approximated by, random matrix theory. In this talk I will explain how the universal content of random matrix theory emerges as the consequence of a simple symmetry-breaking principle and its associated Goldstone modes. This approach gives a natural way to identify...
The asymptotic symmetries of gravity and electromagnetism are remarkably rich. The talk will explain the asymptotic structure of these theories in the asymptotically flat case by making central use of the Hamiltonian formalism. In particular, how the relevant infinite-dimensional asymptotic symmetry groups emerge at spatial infinity will be discussed. Extensions to supergravity will be...
We formulate a series of conjectures relating the geometry of conformal manifolds to the spectrum of local operators in conformal field theories in d > 2 spacetime dimensions. Our central conjecture is that all theories at infinite distance in the Zamolodchikov metric possess an emergent higher-spin symmetry, generated by an infinite tower of currents whose anomalous dimensions vanish...
We present the power of a geometric framework for supergravity and supersymmetric theories solely based on differential calculus on supermanifolds. The relevant field theory Lagrangians are expressed by integral forms, ready to be integrated on the full supermanifold and automatically implementing the invariance under super-diffeomorphisms. We show that different superspace formulations of a...
In this talk we will overview some approaches to study 4d strong coupling phenomena. In particular we will discuss a geometric re-interpretation of N=1 SQCD with special unitary gauge groups. We will argue that the 4d SU(M) SQCD in the middle of the conformal window can be engineered by compactifying certain 6d SCFTs on three punctured spheres. We will also discuss in this context the...
I will discuss confinement in 4d N = 1 SU(N) Super-Yang Mills (SYM) from holography, focusing on the 1-form symmetry and the holographic realization in terms of the Klebanov-Strassler solution. I will show how from the 5d consistent truncation it is possible to identify the topological couplings that determine the 1-form symmetry (and thus global forms of the gauge group) and its ’t Hooft...
We propose a new swampland conjecture stating that the limit of vanishing gravitino mass corresponds to the massless limit of an infinite tower of states and to the consequent breakdown of the effective field theory. We test our proposal in large classes of models coming from compactification of string theory to four dimensions, where we identify the Kaluza-Klein nature of the tower of states...
