Week 26.02.2024 – 03.03.2024

This is part of HoloUK2. Registration is free but space is limited, so please register at https://sites.google.com/view/holouk/home/holouk-2. Correlators in field theories at finite temperatures have singularities on the light cone. Are there any other singularities? In this talk, I will address this question in the context of holographic theories in the black hole phase. Two points on the AdS boundary can be connected by a null geodesic in the bulk, leading to a so-called bulk-cone singularity. These new singularities were previously conjectured by analyzing the geodesic approximation, but we will derive them in full generality by developing the technology of thermal Regge theory. The functional form of the singularity leads to sharp signatures of the AdS photon sphere in the boundary CFT, including an identification of the boundary dual of the angular velocity and Lyapunov exponent associated with the photon sphere. I will also comment on the resolution of the singularity by stringy effects.

This is part of HoloUK2. Registration is free but space is limited, so please register at https://sites.google.com/view/holouk/home/holouk-2. One of the major insights gained from holographic duality is the relation between the physics of black holes and quantum chaotic systems. This relation is made precise in the duality between two dimensional JT gravity and random matrix theory. In this work, we generalize this to a duality between AdS3 gravity and a random ensemble of approximate CFT's. The latter is described by a combined tensor and matrix model, describing the OPE coefficients and spectrum of a theory that approximately satisfies the bootstrap constraints. We show that the Feynman diagrams of the random ensemble produce a sum over 3 manifolds that agrees with the partition function of 3d gravity. A crucial element of this dictionary is the Virasoro TQFT, which defines the bulk gravitational path integral via the cutting and sewing relations of topological field theory. This TQFT has gravitational edge modes degrees of freedom whose entanglement gives rise to gravitational entropy.

In this talk, we examine a fundamental question posed some time ago by Birkhoff and von Neumann: What are the possible structures of measurement in a theory of Physics? We find striking connections with the conceptual framework of First Order Logic, and apply classification theorems for the automorphism groups of first order relational structures to argue for the uniqueness of Hilbert space as the phase space of a theory with probabilistic transitions between atomic states. We discuss possible applications of these observations to Algebraic Quantum Field Theory.

The Symmetry TFT of a quantum field theory is a Topological Field Theory in one dimension more, that describes the structure of the symmetry, its representations, its anomalies, and the possible topological manipulations (gaugings). Until recently only the case of finite symmetries had been addressed. I will present a proposal for the Symmetry TFT of theories with a U(1) symmetry: it is a BF theory with a continuum of topological operators. I will discuss many examples, including chiral anomalies, 2-groups, the non-invertible Q/Z chiral symmetry in 4d with ABJ anomaly, and I will discuss the non-Abelian case as well.

In this talk, I will discuss a connection between the ANEC (Averaged Null Energy Condition) operator and monotonicity of the renormalization group. In particular, I will show how the 2d c-theorem and 4d a-theorem can be derived using the ANEC. This derivation relies on contact terms appearing in specific ANEC correlators. I will also review a new infinite set of constraints that can be derived from the ANEC in 2d QFT. This program hints at a more general role for light-ray operators in QFT, which I will argue for.

Effective Field Theories (EFTs) allow us to describe low energy physics without knowing the specific UV completion. This comes at the cost of having free parameters (Wilson coefficients) whose values encode the UV physics, but are not constraint from a standard EFT point of view. It is well known that some values can lead to unphysical properties of these theories. In this talk, I will present a low energy technique to put bounds on these coefficients by requiring causal propagation. I will show how these bounds can be obtained in flat space and then move on to how apply these techniques in cosmological spacetimes. Throughout the talk I will present bounds on scalar and photon EFTs.