The abstract is: “Holographic field theories with a local gravitational dual have a number of striking properties inferred from the dual description. Much recent work has focused on reproducing these properties purely from a field theory perspective, often invoking conformal invariance. As holographic field theories are always formulated as some sort of (not necessarily conformal) gauge theory, this suggests analyzing … Read More

The abstract is as follows: “String theory combined with inflationary cosmology has led to the picture of inflationary multiverse, populated by a multitude of vacua with diverse properties. Our Universe begins with a quantum tunneling from an eternally-inflating parent vacuum, followed by a period of slow-roll inflation. The details of the high-energy vacuum landscape are not well understood, and its … Read More

Abstract: Causality in conformal field theory is encoded in the averaged null energy condition (ANEC). I will describe three recent applications and extensions of this idea, to holography, non-conformal QFTs, and hydrodynamics. Similar arguments, in these three different settings, lead to constraints on the geodesic length spectrum in quantum gravity, the coupling constants of irrelevant operators in effective field theory, … Read More

It is well known that the dimension of conserved currents is determined simply from dimensional analysis. However, a recent proposal is that what is strange about the conserved currents in the strange metal in the cuprate superconductors is that they carry anomalous dimensions. The basic model invoked to exhibit such behaviour is a holographic dilatonic one in which the field … Read More