Special Theoretical Physics Seminar: Vladimir Rosenhaus, Institute for Advanced Study, “New Solvable Quantum Field Theories”

Event time: 
Monday, February 25, 2019 - 1:15pm to 2:15pm
Location: 
Sloane Physics Laboratory (SPL), Room 56 See map
217 Prospect Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

Quantum field theory is a rich subject that forms the cornerstone of much of particle physics, quantum gravity, and condensed matter physics. Quantum field theories at strong coupling lie at the heart of many of the deepest problems in modern physics, and understanding strongly coupled field theory remains a major challenge.

Solvable models have had a long history of guiding our understanding of non-perturbative phenomena in quantum field theory. We begin by briefly reviewing some of the textbook solvable models, including integrable models such as the Sinh-Gordon model and large N models such as two-dimensional QCD with many colors. We then describe a remarkable recently discovered strongly coupled, quantum many-body system - the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model - which exhibits both novel field-theoretic features (a new large N limit) and novel physical features (quantum chaos), while at the same time being solvable. This extraordinary combination of properties has driven the intense activity surrounding SYK and its applications to a wide range of topics, from thermalization and strange metals, to black holes and holographic duality. We review some of these applications, and then present the solution to the SYK model, giving formulas for all correlation functions. In the process of solving SYK, we will need to develop new tools within conformal field theory. We present several results in this direction, including explicit formulas for n-point conformal blocks (the basic building blocks of correlation functions) and describe how these may be applied to the conformal bootstrap - a program to find all conformal field theories through consistency relations. We end with a discussion of future directions for finding richer solvable models which exhibit quantum chaos.

Host: Jack Harris
jack.harris@yale.edu