Events

Date: 5 February 2025   Time: 15:00 - 17:30     

Location: People’s Palace

Schedule for the event

• 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm: Beatrix Muehlmann (IAS), People's Palace (PP1)
• 4:00 pm - 4:30 pm: Tea and Coffee, People's Palace (LG1)
• 4:30 pm - 5:30 pm: Yin-Chen He (Stony Brook), (PP1)
• 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm: Light dinner buffet, People's Palace (LG1)

Titles and abstracts:

The Complex Liouville String (3:00 pm - 4:00 pm)

I will introduce a new 2d gravity/matrix integral duality. The bulk theory is a two-dimensional string theory defined by coupling two copies of Liouville CFT with central charges c = 13 \pm is on the worldsheet. We call this string theory the complex Liouville string. I will argue that the complex Liouville string admits a dual description in terms of a double-scaled two-matrix integral. The string amplitudes, which are the main observables of the complex Liouville string, can be interpreted as cosmological correlators of massive particles, integrated over the metric at future infinity of dS3 to define gauge invariant observables. Furthermore we obtain evidence that the dS3 Gibbons-Hawking entropy can be reproduced exactly by counting the degrees of freedom in the dual matrix integral.

Fuzzy Sphere Regularization of 3D CFTs (4:30pm - 5:30 pm)

Conformal Field Theory (CFT) represents a class of quantum field theories that have profound applications across various physics domains, from critical phenomena in statistical mechanics to quantum matter, quantum gravity, and string theory. In this talk, I will introduce our recently proposed fuzzy (non-commutative) sphere regularization scheme, a method that addresses and offers a solution to the longstanding need for a non-perturbative approach to 3D CFTs. I will first elucidate its fundamental concepts and then dive into illustrative examples, including the 3D Ising transition, conformal defects, and critical gauge theories. Importantly, I will showcase that this scheme is not only potent--revealing a wealth of universal data on 3D CFTs otherwise inaccessible through existing methods--but also efficient, as the necessary computations can be performed on a laptop within an hour. Our innovative scheme not only heralds a new era for the study of CFTs but also hints at a profound interplay between non-commutative geometry and both CFTs and QFTs at large.