Particle Theory Seminar: Mario Martone (Cincinnati) “Understanding the landscape of N=2 Super-conformal field theories”

Event time: 
Tuesday, December 13, 2016 - 3:30pm to 4:30pm
Location: 
Sloane Physics Laboratory (SPL), 52 See map
217 Prospect St.
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

“Understanding the landscape of N=2 Super-conformal field theories”

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.

While our study focuses on Coulomb Branch geometries, we can extract many more information about these SCFTs. I will spend the last part of my talk outlining what else we can learn and the extent in which our study can be complementary to other method to study SCFTs (Conformal Bootstrap above all!).