Colloquium, part of the RTG2575 QFT-Colloquia series
Room 1.221, at 14:00

Speaker: Volker Schomerus, DESY Hamburg

Title: Ising’s Challenge and the Conformal Bootstrap

Abstract:

Throughout the century that has passed since Ernst Ising submitted his PhD thesis, the Ising (-Lenz) model has provided an incredibly fruitful challenge that gave rise to entirely new branches of physics and mathematics. In this colloquium I will focus on the conformal bootstrap program, one of the most radical ways to rethink Quantum Field Theory. It was designed by Polyakov as a mathematical method to access non-perturbative aspects of critical systems/fixed points of the renormalization groups. In the light of holography, such systems are also relevant for the study of quantum gravity. In my presentation I survey some of the milestone achievements of the modern conformal bootstrap and outline current frontiers. The advances will be benchmarked within the context of the critical 3D Ising model.