Physics

In this talk I will describe the properties of half-BPS boundary conditions in
three-dimensional N=4 gauge theories. I will discuss the relationship between this work and the mathematical theory of symplectic duality.

I will describe some situations where mysterious features have appeared in numerical studies of the conformal bootstrap. It is tempting to speculate that they may correspond to new CFTs, but we do not yet have good guesses for a microscopic...

The relationship between 3d gravity and 2d CFT provides a useful controlled playground in which to try and address issues of quantum gravity. In this talk I describe recent thoughts about two related problems: the construction of candidate duals to...

References for this group meeting are papers:

http://journals.aps.org/rmp/pdf/10.1103/RevModPhys.61.1

http://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.59.2607

http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.05710

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0301240

http://arxiv...

Spontaneously broken conformal invariance appears in many contexts such as a class of Higgs portal models, N>=2 SYM on its Coulomb branch, inflation and target space string theory. In observables this broken symmetry is shown to lead to soft...

I will discuss the dimensional continuation of the sphere free energy in conformal field theory. This provides a smooth interpolation between a-anomaly coefficients in even dimensions and F-values in odd dimensions, and suggests a generalization of...

Fluid dynamics is a centuries old phenomenological framework at the centre of various fields of science and engineering. But, we have only recently began to appreciate its claim as a paradigmatic effective field theory of mixed states and its...

In the beginning of my talk I will review some general facts about 3d-3d correspondence and describe how to construct 3d theory T[M_3] associated to a Seifert 3-manifold M_3. Then I will show how one can calculate the Casson-Walker invariant of M_3...