Archive of IAS Friday High Energy Theory Seminars

Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski, and Sully have claimed that unitarity of black hole evaporation is inconsistent with the existence of a smooth horizon. I will argue that computational restrictions prevent the type of thought-experiment which...

I'll explain a new way of looking at 4d supergravity --- as a theory of holomorphic maps into Penrose's twistor space. Allowing twistor space to have N fermionic directions, the theory is anomaly free when N=8. Via the Penrose transform, the vertex...

In the past three years some aspects of the duality in between representation theory of associative algebras and N=2 supersymmetric theories in four dimensions have proven to be crucial for understanding the so-called BPS-quiver theories. Very...

We introduce a method for computing conformal blocks of operators in arbitrary Lorentz representations in any spacetime dimension, making it possible to apply bootstrap techniques to operators with spin. The key idea is to implement the "shadow...