Special HET Seminar | Mario Martone, Cornell University | “Understanding the Landscape of N=2 Super-conformal Field Theories”

Date
Dec 8, 2016, 1:45 pm2:45 pm
Location
Bloomberg Hall of Physics Library - Institute for Advanced Study

Details

Event Description
In this talk I will argue that a systematic classification of 4d N=2 superconformal field theories is possible through a careful analysis of the geometry of their Coulomb branches. I will carefully describe this general framework and then carry out the classification explicitly in the rank-1, that is one complex dimensional Coulomb branch, case. We find that the landscape of rank-1 theories is still largely unexplored and make a strong case for the existence of many new rank-1 SCFTs, almost doubling the number of theories already known in the literature. The existence of 4 of them has been recently confirmed using alternative methods and others have an enlarged N=3, supersymmetry.