TH String Theory Seminar

Understanding the landscape of N=2 Super-conformal field theories.

by Mario Martone

Europe/Zurich
4/2-011 - TH common room (CERN)

4/2-011 - TH common room

CERN

15
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Description
In this talk I will argue that a systematic classification of 4d N=2 superconformal field theories is possible through a careful analysis of the geometry of their Coulomb branches. I will carefully describe this general framework and then carry out the classification explicitly in the rank-1, that is one complex dimensional Coulomb branch, case. We find that the landscape of rank-1 theories is still largely unexplored and make a strong case for the existence of many new rank-1 SCFTs, almost doubling the number of theories already known in the literature. The existence of 4 of them has been recently confirmed using alternative methods and others have an enlarged N=3, supersymmetry. While our study focuses on Coulomb Branch geometries, we can extract many more information about these SCFTs. I will spend the last part of my talk outlining what else we can learn and the extent in which our study can be complementary to other method to study SCFTs (Conformal Bootstrap above all!).