Week 18.01.2015 – 24.01.2015

I will discuss the idea that a black hole in string theory is made up of a large number of microscopic constituents. For a class of black holes and black strings with extended supersymmetry, one has an exact counting formula for the number of states. I will sketch the idea and derivation of some of these formulas. I will then discuss applications to the AdS_2/CFT_1 and the AdS_3/CFT_2 correspondences.

I will discuss conformal bootstrap for SCFTs with four supercharges (eight superconformal charges) between two and four dimensions in a unified language. The special cases of interest are (2,2) SCFTs in d=2, N=2 SCFTs in d=3, and N=1 SCFTs in d=4. I will show how a large class of superconformal blocks can be found from the Casimir differential equation. I will describe the numerical bounds arising from the two independent bootstrap equations of the four-point function involving a chiral field and its conjugate. The bound involves three kinks, one of which corresponds to the IR fixed point of the Wess-Zumino model, and the other two remain mysterious.