Conveners
Parallel Session Thursday: Strings / Mathematicals Physics I
- Craig Lawrie (T (Theorie))
I will discuss the recent construction of a family of 2d CFTs which are unitary, compact and irrational, with only Virasoro symmetry. These are the first robustly studied examples of c>1 2d CFTs with a gap in the twist of Virasoro primaries, which is a standard axiom used in deriving many universal properties of 2d CFTs.
Based on 2211.16503 and WIP with Connor Behan.
A powerful way to study Conformal Field Theories analytically is the Lorentzian inversion formula, which allows to extract the CFT data of a given four-point function from its double discontinuity. One can also derive a dispersion relation that reconstructs directly the full correlator from the same double discontinuity. I will consider the generalisation of these methods to defect CFTs,...
Yukawa models have been suggested to capture a wide array of condensed-matter systems that exhibit emergent Lorentz symmetry. A notable example is the case of graphene sheets, three-dimensional systems described by fermionic theories at the critical point. Graphene undergoes a second-order phase transition structurally very similar to the weak sector of the Standard Model, and this resemblance...
Line defects are an example of extended objects in QFTs and CFTs, describing a plethora of interesting physics such as magnetic impurities, Wilson lines, and brane physics. They provide access to new observables and conformal data, and are important in the study of confinement and generalized symmetries.
I will discuss recent work in which we explore conformal line defects, preserving...
Boundary conditions and extended operators or defects are fundamental aspects of quantum field theory (QFT). Yet, they are generally poorly understood in higher-dimensional interacting QFTs because explicit computations are often intractable. Progress can be made by imposing highly restrictive symmetries. A particularly prominent example in 4d is the maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills (SYM)...
