High Energy Theory Seminar

I will discuss the dimensional continuation of the sphere free energy in conformal field theory. This provides a smooth interpolation between a-anomaly coefficients in even dimensions and F-values in odd dimensions, and suggests a generalization of the existing a-theorems and F-theorems to continuous dimensions. As concrete applications, I will explain how to use the Wilson-Fisher epsilon expansion to find the value of F for the 3d Ising CFT and related O(N) symmetric models, and for the conformal phase of the 3d QED with N_f massless fermions.