Archive of IAS Monday High Energy Theory Seminars

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...

Causality in quantum field theory is encoded in the averaged null energy condition. I will describe how, in large-N CFTs, this energy condition is replaced by a stronger inequality involving the spectrum of the length operator in the dual AdS. This...

While the canonical formulation of graviton perturbation theory is calculationally complex, the freedoms of nonlinear field redefinition and gauge fixing allow for immense simplification and the uncovering of new structures in perturbative gravity...

I will present a general argument for the local bound on the null-null component of the stress tensor in a QFT called the Quantum Null Energy Condition. The argument involves the study of correlation functions of operators undergoing modular...