Quantum Fields and Strings

Perimeter Institute is happy to host the inaugural summer school for the Simons Collaboration on Celestial Holography July 22-26 in Waterloo, ON. The program will feature lectures on background material relevant for graduate students and postdocs interested in this emerging subfield, paired with vision talks on exciting future research directions.

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This survey course introduces some advanced topics in quantum field theory and string theory. Topics may include anomalies, conformal field theory, and bosonic string theory and are subject to change depending on the topics covered in the TBD elective course.

This mini-course will introduce twisted holography, which is holography for BPS subsectors of gauge theory and gravity. We will start by introducing the B-model topological string from the space-time perspective, before discussing branes, backreaction, and the holographic duality.

Zoom: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/98839130613?pwd=SExFK0ZVYzJ3NmJhU1RFa21PWU1qQT09

In this mini-course we will describe some recent integrability developments in N=4 SYM. Pedro will start with some overview of three point functions in this theory. Paul will introduce the powerful Quantum Spectral Curve formalism describing the full planar spectrum of N=4 SYM starting with some elementary spin chain introduction. In this formalism, each operator in the theory is governed by a (set of) Q-function(s). In his last lecture Paul will walk us through an explicit example from beginning to end of a QSC solution. Pedro will then describe some explorations on three point correlation functions in this theory. The goal would be to have a machine where three Q-functions are given as input and a three-point function is spit out as output. We will describe where we are in this quest. 

No Zoom link or hybrid participation available. Registration is not required.

The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is delighted to host the 33rd installment of Strings, the flagship annual conference for the extended string theory community.

Strings 2023 will take place at PI July 24-29. Capacity is limited to 200 in-person attendees. The programming will incorporate an interactive simulcast for virtual attendees.

Recorded talks: https://pirsa.org/C23001

Organizing Committee: Sabrina Pasterski,* Freddy Cachazo, Kevin Costello, Davide Gaiotto, Jaume Gomis, Rob Myers, Pedro Vieira, & Alex Buchel.

Territorial Land Acknowledgement

Perimeter Institute acknowledges that it is situated on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Neutral peoples.

Perimeter Institute is located on the Haldimand Tract. After the American Revolution, the tract was granted by the British to the Six Nations of the Grand River and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation as compensation for their role in the war and for the loss of their traditional lands in upstate New York. Of the 950,000 acres granted to the Haudenosaunee, less than 5 percent remains Six Nations land. Only 6,100 acres remain Mississaugas of the Credit land. 

This school will be an advanced course on the numerical bootstrap. In the lectures, we will discuss advanced theoretical aspects of numerical bootstrap and algorithms. In the tutorials, we will demonstrate how to use simpleboot/hyperion and help the participants to run bootstrap computation on their own clusters. Main examples are 3D Ising, O(2), O(3), Gross-Neveu-Yukawa CFTs. 

The school will consist of one lecture in the morning and two tutorials in the afternoon (one tutorial for simpleboot (by Ning Su) and another one for hyperion (by Aike Liu).

Course materials, including tutorials, slides, and sample codes, can be found at https://gitlab.com/AikeLiu/Bootstrap-Mini-Course

This event is supported by the Simons Collaboration on The Nonperturbative Bootstrap (https://bootstrapcollaboration.com/). 

https://pirsa.org/C23030

Territorial Land Acknowledgement

Perimeter Institute acknowledges that it is situated on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Neutral peoples.

Perimeter Institute is located on the Haldimand Tract. After the American Revolution, the tract was granted by the British to the Six Nations of the Grand River and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation as compensation for their role in the war and for the loss of their traditional lands in upstate New York. Of the 950,000 acres granted to the Haudenosaunee, less than 5 percent remains Six Nations land. Only 6,100 acres remain Mississaugas of the Credit land. 

We thank the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Neutral peoples for hosting us on their land.

The course is an introduction to quantum field theory in curved spacetime. Upon building up the general formalism, the latter is applied to several topics in the modern theory of gravity and cosmology where the quantum properties of fundamental fields play an essential role.

Topics to be covered:
1) Radiation of particles by moving mirrors 
2) Hawking radiation of black holes  
3) Production of primordial density perturbations and gravity waves during inflation
4) Statistical properties of the primordial spectra  

Required prior knowledge:
Foundations of quantum mechanics and general relativity

This course uses quantum electrodynamics (QED) as a vehicle for covering several more advanced topics within quantum field theory, and so is aimed at graduate students that already have had an introductory course on quantum field theory. Among the topics hoped to be covered are: gauge invariance for massless spin-1 particles from special relativity and quantum mechanics; Ward identities; photon scattering and loops; UV and IR divergences and why they are handled differently; effective theories and the renormalization group; anomalies.