Rethinking (super)conformal field theories

by Balt van Rees

Tuesday 29 Nov 2016, 16:00 → 17:00 Europe/London

CLC 202 (Calman Learning Centre)

Quantum field theories are of fundamental importance in theoretical physics, but they are also notoriously hard to define. For conformal field theories the "bootstrap" philosophy constitutes a first-principles approach whose real power has been understood only very recently. I will review the remarkable progress we have made in this direction, with an emphasis on supersymmetric conformal field theories.