TBA

After a review of the spectrum of superstrings on the AdS3 WZW background, I will use a conjecture positing the existence of a phase transition, when the AdS radius becomes of order of the string length, to propose a holographic dual CFT that matches exactly the entire continuous spectrum of the superstring. I will conclude with a few observations on the role of interactions amd discrete, short-string states.

TBA

In this talk I will reexamine the classification of BPS Wilson loops in 3d super Chern-Simons-matter theories. Over the last several years a large class of increasingly intricate constructions of such operators have been found. They involve both discrete and continuous parameters chosen to satisfy varied conditions. In my talk I will explain that the discrete parameters are related to choosing a graded quiver diagram, which may be a subquiver or a cover of the one defining the theory. The continuous parameters are then a singular limit of the variety, a complex manifold, associated to that quiver.

I will first provide a bird-eye view upon the infrared structure of gravity. I will shortly describe the relationship between BMS symmetry, soft theorems and memory effects at leading and subleading orders in the large radius expansion, while emphasizing the specificities of super-Lorentz symmetries. Secondly, I will present a no-go result on the soft hair conjecture: supertranslations induced by matter creating and falling inside black holes do not affect Hawking radiation, though they do affect scattering amplitudes. I will start by proving that Unruh radiation is unaffected by supertranslations induced by a shockwave and then show that Hawking radiation is mathematically related to this system, as a consequence of the principle of equivalence. Third, I will explain how BMS symmetry is associated to flux-balance laws that provide constraints upon the motion of binary compact mergers. Finally, I will present the extension of the BMS group to asymptotically de Sitter spacetimes.

I will describe thermodynamics and calculation of real time correlators in CFTs with extended W-symmetries, dual to AdS_3 gravity with a finite number of higher spin fields. I will point out mechanisms, including the appearance of a novel effective temperature, by which the proposed chaos bound due to Maldacena-Shenker-Stanford is violated in these theories.

A local SL(2,Z) transformation on the Type IIB brane configuration gives rise to an interesting class of 3d superconformal field theories, known as the S-fold SCFTs. One of the interesting features of such a theory is that, in general, it does not admit a conventional Lagrangian description. Nevertheless, it can be described by a quiver diagram with a link being a superconformal field theory, known as the T(U(N)) theory. In this talk, we discuss various properties of the S-fold theories, including their supersymmetric indices, supersymmetry enhancement in the infrared, as well as several interesting dualities.

The TTbar deformation of two dimensional QFTs has various attractive and interesting features, giving a simple CDD deformation of the S matrix, and for instance preserving integrability, if present. As a simple example, deforming massless free scalars gives a Nambu-Goto string in flat space in a uniform light-cone gauge. I will discuss what happens if we deform "twice", i.e. TTbar deform light-cone gauge fixed string sigma models. In this setting, TTbar deformations can be viewed as TsT transformations in a suitable T dual frame. This TsT picture also gives a natural interpretation of the TTbar CDD factor as a Drinfeld-Reshetikhin twist.