TFI 2022: Theories of Fundamental Interactions 2022

13 Jun 2022, 00:45 → 15 Jun 2022, 14:00 Europe/Rome

Palazzo Franchetti - Venice

The 7th Meeting of the INFN Networks GAST, GSS and ST&FI developing Theories of the Fundamental Interactions will take place at Palazzo Franchetti in Venice from June 13 (afternoon) until June 15, 2022.

The Conference will bring together experts and young researchers working on  perturbative and non-perturbative (supersymmetric) quantum gauge theories,  (super)gravity, string theory, conformal field theories and integrable models, gauge/gravity holography and their applications to black holes, cosmology and condensed matter systems.

The Program will include three review lectures, regular talks given by young researchers and a Poster Session. Speakers for the lectures and the talks are proposed by the INFN Network Nodes. Those who wish to present their work at the Poster Session are invited to send (by May 15) a message with the title and a short description to tfi2022@lists.infn.it with the Subject: Poster Presentation. The proposals will be reviewed by the organizers and the authors of the selected posters will be notified shortly after May 15.

Review lectures

Thibault Damour (IHES)

Jan De Boer (U. of Amsterdam)

Laura Donnay (SISSA and TU Wien)

 

Regular talks

Antonio Amariti (INFN Milano)

Francesco Bascone (Napoli)

Max Brinkmann (Bologna & Padova)

Alejandro Cabo-Bizet (King's College London)

Filippo Camilloni (Perugia and NBI Copenhagen)

Fotis Farakos (Padova)

Federico Galli (Firenze)

Stefano Giaccari (Padova)

Simone Giacomelli (Milano Bicocca)

Daniele Gregori (Bologna)

Carlo Heissenberg (Uppsala)

Cristoforo Iossa (SISSA Trieste)

Andrea Luzio (Pisa)

Salvo Mancani (Roma Tor Vergata)

Jacopo Papalini (Parma)

Alessandro Pini (Torino)

Antonio Pittelli (Torino)

Jesse Van Muiden (SISSA & INFN Trieste)

 

Scientific Advisory Board

Giulio Bonelli (SISSA & INFN Trieste)

Anna Ceresole (INFN Torino)

Domenico Seminara (Firenze Uni & INFN Firenze)

 

Local Organizers (INFN Padova)

Davide Cassani, Dmitri Sorokin, Giuseppina Salente (Secretary)

 

 

Poster files

• Barsanti_TFI2022.pdf
• Bertolini_TFI2022.pdf
• Boffo_TFI2022.pdf
• Canneti_TFI2022.pdf
• Guerrini_TFI2022.pdf
• Iacobacci_TFI2022.pdf
• Mignosa_TFI2022.pdf
• Morittu_TFI2022.pdf
• Ravera_TFI2022.pdf
• Ruzziconi_TFI2022.pdf

Monday, 13 June

12:30 → 14:00 Light Lunch & Registration

A light buffet lunch offered at Palazzo Franchetti during the registration time

14:00 → 15:00 review talk - Information Theory in quantum gravity and field theory

Speaker: Jan De Boer (Amsterdam University)

DeBoer_TFI2022.pdf

15:00 → 15:35 Brane evaporation in double holography and entanglement islands

Doubly holographic braneworld models played an important role in understanding the role of entanglement islands. They offer three complementary perspectives: the usual AdS bulk and boundary CFT descriptions, but also a brane picture where a gravitational theory is coupled to a CFT. I will discuss ongoing work on the study of entanglement entropy in a model of braneworld evaporation. From the higher dimensional AdS bulk point of view, this system corresponds to a black hole accelerated by a domain wall with time dependent tension.

Speaker: Federico Galli (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare)

Galli_TFI2022.pdf

15:35 → 16:10 S-fold CFTs and conformal manifolds

Speaker: Jesse Van Muiden (SISSA)

VanMuiden_TFI2022.pdf

16:10 → 16:55 Coffee Break

16:55 → 17:30 Weak gravity, supergravity, and de Sitter vacua

We review recent developments concerning the properties of de Sitter vacua of 4D supergravity. In particular, we analyze the consistency the de Sitter vacua within 4D gauged supergravity from the perspective of the swampland, focusing on the implications of the magnetic weak gravity conjecture, and we also briefly discuss recent developments related to anti-brane uplifts and non-linear supersymmetry.

Speaker: Fotis Farakos (University of Padova)

Farakos_TFI2022.pdf

17:30 → 18:05 Stringy quintessence models in the swampland

The embedding of accelerated expansion, in particular our past and present cosmology, in string theory remains an open problem in string phenomenology. Certain swampland conjectures place stringent bounds on such models. In this talk I will focus on multifield quintessence in the late universe, and the search for transients close to the cosmological parameters today. I will conclude that typical stringy models do not have observationally compatible trajectories, if one starts with matter-dominated initial conditions. I will also describe universal, compatible trajectories starting from early phases of kinetic domination, however these favorable initial conditions are harder to justify.

Speaker: Max Brinkmann (University of Bologna and Padova)

Brinkmann_TFI2022.pdf

18:05 → 18:40 Chiral theories dynamics from symmetries and anomalies

In this talk, I discuss some examples of UV-free chiral gauge theories, looking at their IR effective descriptions from the point of view of symmetries and anomalies. In particular, I show how the 't Hooft anomaly matching conditions (generalized by including higher form symmetries) and the realization of symmetries (either broken or unbroken, exacts or anomalous) allow us to learn some features of the IR theory, e.g. by implying condensates we were not aware of before or by shaping the interaction between IR degrees of freedom.

Speaker: Andrea Luzio (Università di Pisa)

Luzio_TFI2022.pdf

Tuesday, 14 June

09:15 → 10:15 review talk - Gravitational Waves

Speaker: Thibault Damour (IHES)

Damour_TFI2022.pdf

10:15 → 10:50 Eikonal exponentiation and gravitational waves

In this talk I will illustrate recent progress on the connection between scattering amplitudes and the classical emission of gravitational waves in black-hole scattering events. Focusing on the eikonal exponentiation, which provides a strategy to extract the classical limit, I will describe how amplitudes determine the classical deflection in the black-hole trajectories and the spectra of emitted energy and angular momentum. In particular, I will illustrate how soft theorems can be exploited to calculate efficiently the zero-frequency limit of such spectra, and the radiation backreaction on the black-hole motion.

Speaker: Carlo Heissenberg (Uppsala)

Heissenberg_TFI2022.pdf

10:50 → 11:20 Coffee Break

11:20 → 11:55 Black hole perturbations from Liouville correlators

Reversing the logic of the bootstrap approach in Liouville CFT we explicitly compute the connection formulae for degenerate conformal blocks. In the semiclassical limit of the theory, this amounts to solving the connection problem of Fuchsian ODEs. Generalizing to irregular insertions we solve as well for various confluences of the ODE. Concentrating on the Heun equation and its confluences, we can solve the wave equations of a large class of gravitational backgrounds. In deed, when the wave equation of a black hole or a microstate is separable, it often reduces to Heun equations, and exact connection formulae give access to several interesting quantities. As a working example, we focus on the 4d Kerr black hole, and exactly compute the absorption coefficient, QNMs and Love numbers in terms of combinatorial objects exploiting the AGT duality.

Speaker: Cristoforo Iossa (SISSA - Trieste)

Iossa_TFI2022.pdf

11:55 → 12:30 Matched Asymptotic Expansion for Spinning Black Hole Magnetospheres

In 1977 Blandford & Znajek (BZ) initiated the analytic study of force-free magnetospheres by developing a perturbation scheme in the slow spin regime of a Kerr black hole, which lead to the discovery of a viable electromagnetic Penrose-like process for extracting energy and angular momentum. In this talk we solve the BZ perturbation theory at higher orders by means of a matched asymptotic expansion scheme and discover the unavoidable presence of non-analytic terms in the perturbative parameter entering the expressions for the energy extracted by the magnetosphere. These terms allows us to reach an unprecedented agreement with past numerical simulations up to the near-extreme regime and can potentially predict new features about the non-perturbative structure of the BZ theory, showing how the construction of analytic models still constitutes a powerful tool in this field.

Speaker: Filippo Camilloni (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare)

Camilloni_TFI2022.pdf

12:30 → 13:05 Exact TTbar deformation of two-dimensional Yang-Mills theory

In this talk, I will discuss the TTbar deformation of Yang-Mills theory in two dimensions. Focusing on the sphere topology and unitary gauge groups, I will show how the deformed partition function can be obtained by solving the relevant flow equation at the level of individual flux sectors. For positive values of the deformation parameter, the quantum spectrum of the theory experiences a truncation, the partition function reducing to a sum over a finite set of energy levels. For negative values, the appearance of nonperturbative contributions drastically modifies the structure of the partition function regularising its naive divergences. In the large-N expansion, the theory exhibits a rich phase diagram where the transitions between different phases are driven by instantons both in the 't Hooft coupling (leading to a deformed Douglas-Kazakov phase transition) and in the deformation parameter.

Speaker: Jacopo Papalini (Università di Parma)

Papalini_TFI2022.pdf

13:05 → 14:30 Lunch

Buffet lunch offered at Palazzo Franchetti

14:30 → 15:05 3d N=2 dualities for SQCD with D-type superpotential

In this talk I will discuss IR dualities for 3d supersymmetric QCD with
four supercharges and extra fields in tensorial representation of the
gauge group, giving rise to superpotential of D-type, where D refers to
the A-D-E classification. The prototypical example of such dualities was conjectured in the mid 90's for SU(N) SQCD with four supercharges and with two adjoints. Various generalizations, involving real gauge groups and other two-index tensor
representations, have been studied as well. In this talk I will show how these results extend to 3d, generalizing previous constructions discussed in the recent literature and unifying the webs of dualities found here with the ones already obtained for ordinary SQCD and for SQCD with one adjoint and an A-type superpotential. As a consistency check I will discuss a parallel analysis in terms of the three sphere partition function. I will conclude by discussing open problems and possible future directions.

Speaker: Antonio Amariti (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Milano)

Amariti_TFI2022.pdf

15:05 → 15:40 Exact results in a N=2 SCFT at strong coupling

We consider the N=2 SYM theory with gauge group SU(N) and a matter content consisting of one multiplet in the symmetric and one in the anti-symmetric representation of the gauge group. This theory is conformal and it admits a large-N 't Hoof t expansion and a gravity dual given by a particular orientifold of AdS_5 X S^5. We analyze this theory relying on
the matrix model provided by localization à la Pestun. Even if this matrix model has very non-trivial interactions, by exploiting the full Lie algebra approach to the matrix integration, we show that a large class of observables can be expressed in a closed form in terms of an infinite matrix depending on the 't Hooft coupling lambda. These exact expressions can be used to generate the perturbative expansions at high orders and also to analytically study the leading behavior at strong coupling.
Finally we compare these predictions to a direct Monte Carlo numerical evaluation of the matrix integral and to the Padé resummation derived from very long perturbative series. We also discuss the generalization of these results for a circular quiver gauge theory.

Speaker: Alessandro Pini (Università di Torino)

Pini_TFI2022.pdf

15:40 → 16:10 Coffee Break

16:10 → 16:45 Lower dimensional BPS sectors in 4d SU(N) N=4 SYM

I will explain how in the expansion near roots of unity, the four-dimensional superconformal index decomposes into a sum over independent sectors, some of them described by A-models wrapping Riemann surfaces. Starting from the four dimensional index the partition function of these lower dimensional systems is reduced to a sum over vacua of the specific A-model. The number of degrees of freedom is subleading in the large N expansion, and their contribution to the index, which seems to naturally organize as a sum over genus-g contributions, calls for a string dual interpretation.

Speaker: Alejandro Cabo-Bizet (King's College)

CaboBizet_TFI2022.pdf

16:45 → 17:20 Charting the space of 4d supersymmetric theories from string theory

Supersymmetric field theories represent an invaluable theoretical laboratory for the exploration of non-perturbative dynamics and their geometric realization in string theory has proven to be a very effective tool to understand them, allowing us to construct and study in detail the properties of strongly-coupled theories even when they lack a lagrangian description. In this talk I will present a new method to engineer four dimensional theories with eight supercharges from D3 branes probing non-perturbative Type IIB (F-theory) backgrounds. This allows us to construct many new N=2 theories, including N=3 models and all superconformal theories with one-dimensional Coulomb branch. Furthermore, by exploiting this construction we find a connection between these 4d theories and superconformal theories in six dimensions which proves crucial to understand their moduli space of vacua.

Speaker: Simone Giacomelli (Università di Milano Bicocca)

Giacomelli_TFI2022.pdf

17:20 → 17:55 Novel exact results and new indices for supersymmetric theories in three dimensions

We discuss special subsectors of protected operators appearing in quantum field theories with extended supersymmetry defined on a general class of three-dimensional manifolds. Correlators of such BPS operators are generated by a one-dimensional Gaussian model obtained from localization and turn out to be topological as well as strongly dependent on the global features of the original 3-manifold. Furthermore, we show how extending localization techniques to backgrounds with orbifold singularities leads to novel types of supersymmetric indices, generalizing superconformal and topologically twisted indices. In particular, these new observables are relevant for the microstate counting of the recently constructed supersymmetric and accelerating black holes in four-dimensional Anti-de Sitter space-time.

Speaker: Antonio Pittelli (Università di Torino)

Pittelli_TFI2022.pdf

18:00 → 19:30 Poster Session & buffet

Wednesday, 15 June

09:30 → 10:30 review talk - Towards Celestial Holography

Speaker: Laura Donnay (TU - Wien)

Donnay_TFI2022.pdf

10:30 → 11:05 New dualities from orientifold projections

The brane tiling machinery allows us to construct 4d SCFTs that represent the gauge side of the AdS/CFT correspondence. These theories arise from D3 branes probing a singular toric CY cone. One can add orientifold planes to the system, and the projected gauge theory can still be read from the brane tiling. One may expect that either the orientifold yields subleading correction to R-charges and conformal invariance is preserved at large N, or that the orientifold breaks scale invariance. In this talk, I will focus on the orientifold projection of the specific toric singularities denoted as L^{a,b,a} and show that when conformal invariance is broken, a new fixed point arises in the infrared. Moreover, we show evidence for the new SCFT to be dual to the orientifold projection of a different toric geometry.

Speaker: Salvo Mancani (Roma Tor Vergata)

Mancani_TFI2022.pdf

11:05 → 11:50 Coffee Break

11:50 → 12:25 Quantum Integrability in the ODE/IM Correspondence Approach for New Exact Results in N=2 Supersymmetric Gauge Theories and Black Holes' Observables

In this talk I will explain first of all a new connection we found between quantum integrable models and black holes' perturbation theory. To begin with, I will introduce black holes’ quasinormal modes (QNMs) and their role in gravitational waves observations, showing in particular how to connect their mathematically precise definition with the integrable model's (IM) structures derived from the ordinary differential equation (ODE) associated to the black hole perturbation, in the approach of the ODE/IM correspondence. More precisely, I will derive the full system of functional and non linear integral equations (Thermodynamic Bethe Ansatz, TBA) typical of quantum integrability and prove that QNMs verify different equivalent exact quantization conditions. As a consequence, it follows a new simple and effective method to numerically compute the quasinormal modes - the TBA - which I will compare with other methods. I will also give a mathematical explanation of the recently found connection between quasinormal modes and N=2 supersymmetric gauge theories, through the further connection we previously found of these to quantum integrable models and which I will also briefly summarize. Moreover, I will swiftly tell how other black holes' observables like the greybody factor (or absorption coefficient, which accounts for Hawking radiation) could be tackled and computed through the same integrability methods. All this I will show for a generalization of extremal Reissner-Nordström (charged) black holes, but in the end I will explain how we think it should be possible to generalize it to many other (General Relativity or String Theory-) types of black holes, branes, fuzzballs, in either asymptotically flat or asymptotically AdS spacetime and thus provide a new effective tool for the study on one hand of supersymmetric gauge theories and on the other hand of gravitational waves and quantum gravity.

Based on:
1 D. Fioravanti, D. Gregori, arXiv:2112.11434 (2021)
2 D. Fioravanti, D. Gregori, arXiv:1908.08030, Phys.Lett.B 804, 135376 (2020)
3 D. Fioravanti, D. Gregori, H. Shu, to appear soon

Speaker: Daniele Gregori (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare)

Gregori_TFI2022.pdf

12:25 → 13:00 Orbifolds in spacetime

Orbifolding in string theory is a standard procedure to get new theories from old ones either by gauging a global symmetry of the worldsheet sigma model or by quotienting a geometric string background by some isometries. The absence of global symmetries characterizes all known string theory models (and, conjecturally, all theories of quantum gravity), so that the orbifold procedure from a purely spacetime quantum field theoretic perspective is not fully understood. We illustrate a proposal for an orbifold procedure that does not rely on worldsheet techniques. We discuss some simple examples and possible consequences.

Speaker: Stefano Giaccari (Università di Padova)

Giaccari_TFI2022.pdf

13:00 → 13:35 Topological and dynamical aspects of the Jacobi sigma model

The main features of the Jacobi sigma model will be illustrated. The Jacobi sigma model is a topological field theory with target space a Jacobi manifold, and it is a generalization of the Poisson sigma model. It is a non-linear gauge theory and it has interesting properties which can be useful for both physical and mathematical applications. In particular, contact as well as locally conformal symplectic manifolds will be considered as target spaces for the model, leading to interesting results for string backgrounds. A dynamical extension will be also discussed and applied for the SU(2) Lie group as a contact manifold, as it shows an interesting relation with Poisson-Lie T-duality.

Speaker: Francesco Bascone (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare)