Quivers, Symmetries and SCFTs

8 Sept 2025, 09:00 → 12 Sept 2025, 18:00 Europe/Rome

ICTP

Amihay Hanany (Imperial College, London), Julius Grimminger (Oxford University), Sara Pasquetti (Milano Bicocca), Sergio Benvenuti (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare)

The dynamics of strongly coupled quantum field theories (QFTs) has been a central problem in theoretical physics in the past half-century; from its origins in QCD to many ramifications in Beyond-Standard-Model physics, cosmology, condensed matter physics, and high energy physics. QFTs are subject to renormalization group flow, and understanding its fixed points, i.e.\ conformal field theories (CFTs), is a fundamental step towards understanding more general QFTs. The detailed analysis of CFTs in dimension d>2 remains a formidable challenge. Supersymmetry drastically increases our analytic control. More than that, in dimensions d>4 the only known examples of interacting CFTs to this day are superconformal field theories (SCFTs). Almost all SCFTs are strongly coupled and lack a traditional Lagrangian description. Therefore studying them provides new insights in the dynamics of strongly coupled QFTs. In recent years several methods of approaching these problems through string theory and geometry have been developed. In particular quivers can be used very effectively to tackle many difficult questions.