IAS High Energy Theory Seminar

The zeta-instanton equation (also known as Witten's d-bar equation) is a partial differential equation arising in two-dimensional supersymmetric field theory. In this talk I will review some of its properties and applications, from the...

The area operator plays a central role in our understanding of holography and black hole thermodynamics. In this talk I will discuss a formulation of the area operator at the level of classical gravity, the “kink transform”, which defines a notion...

The past decade has seen the emergence of surprising new connections between the real-world physics of elementary particle scattering processes, and simple new mathematical structures in combinatorics, algebra and geometry. These ideas provide, in a...

Edge excitations of (2+1)D topological phases are usually described using continuum field theories. But the boundaries of some (2+1)D topological phases can also be described using lattice-like edge theories that have a finite dimensional Hilbert...

 q-deformed Virasoro and W-algebras were defined a quarter century ago with the aim of furthering our understanding of two-dimensional integrable and conformal field theories, while also developing the representation theory of so-called quantum...

We study the Lyapunov exponent in disordered quantum field theories. Generically the Lyapunov exponent can only be computed in isolated CFTs, and little is known about the way in which chaos grows as we deform the theory away from weak coupling. In...

In this talk, we explore new techniques to probe the analytic structure of scattering amplitudes in perturbative Quantum Field Theory. The goal of this approach is to leverage symmetries, limits, and analyticity in order to circumvent the explicit...

Quantum computers employ quantum circuits to implement algorithms. They are composed of quantum gates that act on near neighbors according to some spatial geometry. They are particular instances of quantum cellular automata (QCA), the set of...

Type IIB supergravity famously has a discrete duality group, which is an exact symmetry of the full type IIB string theory. This symmetry has potential quantum anomalies, which could render the theory inconsistent. In this talk I will describe how...

We construct vacua of string theory in which all moduli are stabilized and the magnitude of the cosmological constant is exponentially small.  The vacua are supersymmetric AdS_4 solutions in flux compactifications of type IIB string theory on...