Events Archive

HET Seminar |Gabriel Cuomo, Princeton/NYU| "Comments on CFTs with moduli spaces" |PCTS
Fri, Oct 25, 2024, 11:00 am12:00 pm

Abstract: Conformal field theories that exhibit spontaneous breaking of conformal symmetry (a moduli space of vacua) are expectedly rare in the landscape of CFTs. Intuitively, this is because a delicate conspiracy is needed to fine-tune to zero the potential of the dilaton. Yet, it is difficult to phrase this intuition in…

HET Seminar |Pietro Pelliconi - University of Geneva | “Gravity as a Mesoscopic System" | PCTS
Fri, Oct 11, 2024, 11:00 am12:00 pm

We employ a probabilistic mesoscopic description to draw conceptual and quantitative analogies between Brownian motion and late-time fluctuations of thermal correlation functions in generic chaotic systems respecting ETH. We apply this formalism to the case of semiclassical gravity in AdS3, showing that wormhole contributions can be naturally…

HET Seminar |Zixia Wei, Harvard| “Holographic Dual of Crosscap CFT and Emergent de Sitter Features | PCTS
Mon, Oct 7, 2024, 2:30 pm3:30 pm

I propose a bottom-up correspondence between a CFT defined on 2D non-orientable manifolds, such as the real projective plane (RP2) and the Klein bottle (K2), and AdS3 Einstein gravity with dS2 end-of-the-world branes. In this correspondence, a global dS2 end-of-the-world brane (a quotient by Z2) is described by the unitary time evolution of a…

PGI Seminar Series Fall 2024 |Maxime Van De Moortel |Rutgers University| "Some Mathematical Aspects of Asymptotically Anti-de-Sitter Black Holes"
Mon, Oct 7, 2024, 12:30 pm1:30 pm

Abstract: The Anti-de-Sitter/Condensed Matter Theory (AdS/CMT) correspondence has attracted significant attention within high-energy physics, particularly in the study of holographic superconductors, which are modeled as asymptotically Anti-de-Sitter (AdS) hairy black holes. In this talk, I will present recent mathematical advancements in the…

HET Seminar |Jan Albert, Princeton University| “Pushing the S-matrix bootstrap” | PCTS
Fri, Sep 27, 2024, 11:00 am12:00 pm

First introduced in the 60s, positivity bounds for S-matrices have undergone a revival in the past few years, with systematic implementations that improve by the day. Among the recent results are sharp bounds on the EFTs of various gauge and gravitational theories. A common feature of the resulting exclusion regions, however, is that they tend…

HET Seminar |Gregory Falkovich, Weizmann Institute| “Sea storm as a problem in field theory” | PCTS
Mon, Sep 23, 2024, 2:30 pm3:30 pm

I shall describe the recent theoretical advances in the description of turbulence in different media.

An important point is how different the meaning of renormalization in turbulence is from what we used to know in the field theory.

For quartic interaction, we were recently able to compute the vertex renormalization and distinguish…

HET Seminar |Shai Chester, Imperial College London| “Monopoles, duality, and QED3” | PCTS
Mon, Sep 16, 2024, 2:30 pm3:30 pm

We consider quantum electrodynamics in 2+1 dimensions (QED3) with N matter fields and Chern-Simons level k. For small values of k and N, this theory describes various experimentally relevant systems in condensed matter, and is also conjectured to be part of a web of non-supersymmetric dualities. We compute the scaling dimensions of monopole…

Special Seminar - Sept. 16th - 11 AM - Zheng-Cheng Gu (Chinese University of Hong Kong) “Tensor network simulation in strongly correlated systems: past, present and future” - PCTS room 407
Mon, Sep 16, 2024, 11:00 am12:00 pm

Tensor network states are new kinds of variational wavefunctions that help us to understand quantum phases and phase transitions beyond Landau paradigm. In this talk, I will first review the major development of tensor network simulation in the past two decades. In particular, I will introduce the novel concept of long-range entanglement and…

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Faculty, post docs, grads
IAS HET Seminar | Beatrix Muehlmann, Member, School of Natural Sciences, IAS| “The Complex Liouville String” | Bloomberg Lecture Hall (IAS) & Zoom
Fri, Sep 13, 2024, 11:00 am12:00 pm

I will introduce a new 2d gravity/matrix integral duality. The bulk theory is a two-dimensional string theory defined by coupling two copies of Liouville CFT with central charges c = 13 ± is on the worldsheet. We call this string theory the complex Liouville string. The complex Liouville string may be recast…

IAS IAS HET Seminar | Ignacio Cirac, Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics | “Experimental Implementations of Quantum Computers and Simulations” | Bloomberg Lecture Hall (IAS) & Zoom
Mon, Sep 9, 2024, 2:30 pm3:30 pm

The existence of multi black hole solutions in asymptotically flat spacetimes is one of the expectation from the final state conjecture. In this talk, I will present preliminary works in this direction via a semilinear toy model in dimension 3. In particular, I show 1) an algorithm to construct approximate…

IAS HET Seminar | Wilbur Shirley, Member, School of Natural Sciences, IAS| “'t Hooft Anomaly Detection in 2+1d Lattice Systems” | Bloomberg Lecture Hall (IAS) & Zoom
Fri, May 24, 2024, 11:00 am12:00 pm

I will discuss two methods for diagnosing ’t Hooft anomalies of internal symmetries in 2+1d lattice systems. Anomalous symmetries of this kind arise naturally at the boundary of 3+1D symmetry-protected topological phases, and are known to be classified by the group cohomology of the symmetry group. The first method is…

IAS HET Seminar | Amihay Hanany, Imperial College London| “Magnetic Quivers and Phase Diagrams” | Bloomberg Lecture Hall (IAS)
Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 2:00 pm3:00 pm

Higgs branches in theories with 8 supercharges change as one tunes the gauge coupling to critical values.

This talk will focus on six dimensional (0,1) supersymmetric theories in studying the different phenomena associated with such a change. Based on a Type IIA brane system, involving NS5 branes, D6 branes and…

HET Seminar |Zahra Zahraee, McGillUniversity| “Bootstrapping N = 4 sYM using integrability” |PCTS
Mon, Apr 29, 2024, 2:30 pm3:30 pm

In this talk we use integrability data to bootstrap correlation functions of planar maximally supersymmetric Yang- Mills theory, focusing on four-point correlation function of stress-tensor. First, we start by demonstrating why the conventional bootstrap approach fails and new techniques are required. Next,…

IAS HET Seminar | Ibrahima Bah, Johns Hopkins University| “Aspects of Topological Symmetry, Holography, and Branes” | Bloomberg Lecture Hall (IAS) & Zoom
Fri, Apr 26, 2024, 11:00 am12:00 pm

In this talk I will discuss holographic duals of topological operators.  At low energy sugra, they can be realized by Page charge associated to Gauss law constraints. In the UV string theory, topological operators can be characterized by various brane configurations. This provides a way of exploring generalized…

IAS HET Seminar | Senthil Todadri, Massachusetts Institute of Technology| “Unnecessary” Quantum Critical Points in Condensed Matter and Field Theory” | Bloomberg Lecture Hall (IAS) & Zoom
Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 2:30 pm3:30 pm

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 continuous) so that there is a path that avoids them. First found in critical…

HET Seminar |Uwe Trittmann, Otterbein University| “An alternative approach to solving two-dimensional adjoint QCD ” |PCTS
Thu, Apr 18, 2024, 3:00 pm4:00 pm

The method of exhaustively-symmetrized light-cone quantization (eLCQ) is described. As a continuous approach to solving quantum bound-state problems, it exploits the symmetries of physical systems to generate an optimal set of basis functions. It has been successfully applied to two-dimensional QCD with adjoint fermions in the…

IAS HET Seminar |David Berenstein, University of California, Santa Barbara “Staggered Bosons, Kahler Dirac Bosons and Supersymmetry on the Lattice” | Bloomberg Lecture Hall (IAS) & Zoom
Mon, Apr 15, 2024, 2:30 pm3:30 pm

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 neighbors. The construction is similar to staggered fermions in 1+1…

HET Seminar |Nikolay Bobev, Ku Leuven | “A Holographic Trilogy at Large N: The Power, the Logarithm, and the Exponent” |PCTS
Fri, Apr 12, 2024, 2:00 pm3:00 pm

I will summarize recent results on the large N limit of path integrals of 3d SCFTs arising on the worldvolume of N M2-branes placed on compact Euclidean manifolds. The leading N^3/2 term in the large N expansion of these "free energies" receives 1/N, log(N), as well as exponentially suppressed corrections that can be…

IAS HET Seminar | Nathan Haouzi, Member, School of Natural Sciences, IAS| “The Miura Operator is an R-matrix, via Intersecting Branes” | Bloomberg Lecture Hall (IAS) & Zoom
Fri, Apr 12, 2024, 11:00 am12:00 pm

 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 implications. I will also describe how to…

IAS HET Seminar | Ahsan Khan, Member, School of Natural Sciences, IAS| “Algebra of the Infrared with Twisted Masses” | Bloomberg Lecture Hall (IAS) & Zoom
Wed, Apr 10, 2024, 11:00 am12:00 pm

The Gaiotto-Moore-Witten "Algebra of the Infrared" allows one to construct the category of supersymmetric boundary conditions for a wide class of massive N=(2,2) QFTs in two dimensions. In particular, it applies to N=(2,2) QFTs defined by a Morse superpotential W. However, the formalism breaks down if we consider an N=…