Archive of IAS Monday High Energy Theory Seminars

With the recent LIGO results it has been clear that we can learn a lot about the distribution of binary black hole systems. Yet the origin of these black holes is still unknown. Do they come from galactic centers, globular clusters, or from more...

We discuss some target space aspects of the FZZ duality both in the Euclidean setup of the cigar geometry and in the SL(2)/U(1) black hole. We argue that the 2D classical SL(2)/U(1) black hole could shed some light on quantum black holes in higher...

In this talk I review new results obtained for SCFT's in 4 and 5 dimensions by compactifying 6 dimensional (1,0) SCFT's on a circle or on Riemann surfaces.

The multiscale entanglement renormalization ansatz (MERA) is a tensor network that can efficiently approximate ground states of critical spin chains --that is, lattice versions of 1+1 CFTs. Its network structure extends in an additional dimension...

Properties of CFT operators carrying some large global charge can be systematically computed in a 1/Q expansion by assuming that the corresponding states on the cylinderare described by a supefluid phase. In particular one can compute the spectrum...

There seem to be no good examples of UV complete theories that have low-lying massive higher spin states isolated by a large gap, despite the relative ease of constructing effective field theories describing such states. We discuss constraints from...

We discuss how to obtain dynamics of semiclassical gravity in 3d AdS from the large central charge limit of irreducible representations of the conformal algebra of 2d CFTs, with a focus on black hole information loss and bulk reconstruction. We...

String field theory is the refined definition of string theory, formulated in the language of quantum field theory. Unlike the conventional Polyakov approach, it provides a well defined prescription for computing the scattering amplitudes in string...

There is no doubt that there is a revolution going on in machine learning and artificial intelligence, but what does it mean for physics? Is it all hype, or will it transform the way we think about and do physics?I will describe machine learning...