IAS High Energy Theory Seminar

Quantum critical points usually separate two distinct phases of matter. Here I will discuss a class of "unnecessary" quantum critical points that lie within a single phase of matter (much like the liquid-gas transition, except that they are...

I will describe constructions of lattice field theories that assign a single bosonic variable to each site, rather a conjugate pair x,p. The information to realize a non-trivial dynamics is realized by non-trivial Poisson brackets between nearest...

The Miura transformation is a powerful formalism to construct generators of vertex operator algebras in free field representation. In this talk, I will explain that Miura operators are R-matrices of a certain quantum algebra, and comment on physical...

Holographic tensor networks model AdS/CFT, but so far they have been limited by involving only systems that are very different from gravity. Unfortunately, we cannot straightforwardly discretize gravity to incorporate it, because that would break...

I will describe the one-loop partition function for strings propagating on AdS3 geometries with NS-NS flux (for generic values of AdS radius in string units). The essential ingredients that go into this analysis have been known for a while. The goal...

I will describe a double scaled matrix and tensor integral whose Feynman diagrams can be organized in a 3d topological expansion which agrees term by term with partition functions of 3d gravity. The integral is taken over CFT2 data, and the limiting...

The TTbar deformation is a holographic theory describing holography a finite distance in the bulk.   If this theory can be UV completed, it could be a model of nonperturbative bulk quantum gravity.  However, it seems to be a non-unitary theory, as...

We will discuss excitations with large spin and/or large particle number. For conformal theories this corresponds to investigating particular trajectories of heavy operators. 

We find trajectories with large approximate degeneracy and show that they...

I will give a lightning review of results on this subject from 1988-1998 and then describe more recent developments, mostly current work in progress.  First, I will describe topological twisting of Lagrangian N=2 d=4 field theories in terms of the...

Conformal Field Theory (CFT) represents a class of quantum field theories that has profound applications across various physics domains, from critical phenomena in statistical mechanics to quantum matter, quantum gravity, and string theory. In this...