How (not) to confine color: a bootstrap study of Yang Mills in AdS

by Prof. Alessandro Vichi (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare)

Wednesday 11 Mar 2026, 14:30 → 16:30 Europe/Rome

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Yang–Mills theory in Anti–de Sitter space with Dirichlet boundary conditions is expected to undergo a qualitative transition as the AdS radius is varied, since the induced boundary data are incompatible with standard confinement in flat space. Multiple mechanisms have been proposed for the (de)confinement transition. From the boundary perspective, the corresponding three-dimensional CFT is a deformation of a generalised free theory of non-Abelian conserved currents, with the deformation controlled by the bulk gauge coupling  In this talk, after reviewing the basic bootstrap approach, I will present non-perturbative constraints obtained from the numerical conformal bootstrap of the four-point function of these currents. The resulting bounds allow us to rule out a scenario in which the boundary current decouples, and they strongly disfavour a bulk Higgs mechanism.