Speaker: Liam Fitzpatrick
Room: Physics 432
Title: Universal Dynamics from the Conformal Bootstrap
Abstract: Conformal Field Theories (CFTs) play a central role in understanding strongly coupled physics across a wide range of phenomena. One of the most powerful tools for studying them is the Conformal Bootstrap, which in the past several years has seen renewed interest and tremendous progress in its applications. In this talk, we discuss how the Conformal Bootstrap can be used to uncover and prove universal dynamical behavior that is satisfied by all CFTs in some limits, and large classes of them in other limits. Through the Anti-de Sitter/CFT (AdS/CFT) correspondence, these results can be interpreted to imply universal aspects of dynamical behavior of the dual gravitational theories, including locality and the emergence of Newtonian gravity at large distances. For CFTs in two dimensions, we demonstrate how in systems with a large number of degrees of freedom, high energy eigenstates can be shown to create classical backgrounds. This can be directly related to black hole geometries in a semi-classical limit of the gravitational duals, and to a phenomenon known as Eigenstate Thermalization whereby pure states mimic thermal backgrounds in the CFT. Methods for going beyond the semi-classical limit of gravity are discussed.
