The Sinh-Gordon model is a 1+1 dimensional quantum field theory with a potential cosh(b phi) that is quite peculiar. It is at the same time exactly solvable (for many observables) and not well understood. I will present the results of a variational exploration of its strong coupling regime with a recent generalization of continuous matrix product states. The advantage of this method is that it...
Renormalons are non-perturbative effects which are manifested in perturbative series. While they figure in asymptotically free field theories including both QCD and some integrable models, they are in general poorly understood. In this talk I will present results on how to analytically find these non-pertubative effects in the free energy of integrable models. These effects turn out to defy...
Anti-de Sitter spacetime is interesting for many reasons: of course it furnishes a canvas for the study of quantum gravity, but it also appears to be a fruitful setting for Hamiltonian truncation. After all, QFTs in AdS have a notion of conserved energy, their Hilbert spaces are well-understood, and even a hard energy cutoff preserves many spacetime symmetries. In this talk I will discuss this...
In this talk I will present the torus spectroscopy, i.e. the analysis of the finite volume spectrum of the Hamiltonian on a spatial torus in 2+1D as a practical numerical tool to determine the universality class of quantum phase transitions. We show an application with an emergent 3D O(2) phase transition and that we are able to detect the presence of dangerously irrelevant couplings. In a...
Dissipative relativistic hydrodynamics is expected to describe the late times, thermalised behaviour of strongly coupled fluids such as a strongly coupled super Yang-Mills plasma. These systems are then accurately described by a hydrodynamic series expansion in small gradients. Surprisingly, this hydrodynamic expansion is accurate even when the systems are still quite anisotropic: the...
Hamiltonian truncation methods represent a powerful toolbox for a set of problems that are otherwise very challenging in strongly coupled quantum field theory: nonequilibrium physics and real time evolution. In many such cases analytical approaches are limited as well as numerical tools like lattice gauge theory and tensor networks. I will talk about recent developments in this field with...
Hamiltonian truncation is a non-perturbative numerical method for calculating observables of a quantum field theory by truncating the Hilbert space to states with energy below a maximum energy cutoff. In this talk I will present an effective field theory approach to Hamiltonian truncation, which provides a systematic way of improving the calculations without increasing the energy cutoff. I...
Nonintegrable QFTs are expected to thermalize and exhibit emergence of hydrodynamics and chaos. In weakly coupled QFTs, kinetic theory captures local thermalization; such a versatile tool is absent away from the perturbative regime. I will present analytical and numerical results using nonperturbative methods to study thermalization at strong coupling. I will show how requiring causality in...
The growth of Renyi entropies after the injection of energy into a correlated system provides a window upon the dynamics of its entanglement properties. We provide here a scheme by which this growth can be determined in Luttinger liquids systems with arbitrary interactions, even those introducing gaps into the liquid. This scheme introduces the notion of a generalized mixed state Renyi...
Numerical calculations using lattice-regularized QFTs are a powerful tool to understand nonperturbative systems when analytic methods are unavailable. However, the utility of numerical results can be affected by two issues: (i) calculations are necessarily performed in a finite-volume spacetime and (ii) Euclidean- (rather than Minkowski-) signature correlation functions are evaluated. Both...
We develop a truncated Hamiltonian method to investigate the dynamics of the 1 +1-dimensional ϕ^4 theory following quantum quenches. The results are compared to two different semiclassical approaches, the self-consistent Gaussian approximation and the truncated Wigner approximation, and used to determine the range of validity of these widely used approaches. We then use this method to...
Recent advances in Hamiltonian truncation have demonstrated it to be a useful tool for obtaining nonperturbative information about quantum field theories, even in the strongly-coupled regime. One particularly exciting feature of this technique is that it can be formulated in Minkowski rather than Euclidean space, making it easier to calculate real-time quantities. Truncation is particularly...
Jets of hadrons produced at high-energy colliders provide experimental access to the dynamics of asymptotically free quarks and gluons and their confinement into hadrons. Motivated by recent developments in conformal field theory, we show that questions of interest in collider physics can be reformulated as the study of correlation functions of a specific class of light-ray operators and their...
Theory Colloquium
The term Tensor Network States (TNS) designates a number of ansatzes that can efficiently represent certain states of quantum many-body systems. In particular, ground states and thermal equilibrium of local Hamiltonians, and, to some extent, real time evolution can be numerically studied with TNS methods. Quantum information theory provides tools to understand why they are...
I will describe the idea of adiabatic continuity which can be used to continuously connect strongly coupled gauge theories on R^4 to compactified gauge theories on two set-ups: R^3 x S^1 and R^2 x T^2. Recall that in standard (thermal) compactifications, there are generically phase transitions. But in the last 15 years, we learned how to go around them and move to weak coupling regimes...
There are two known ways to tie quark confinement to symmetries: one way (the older one) in terms of "center symmetry", and the other one (the newer one) is in terms of a "1-form symmetry". By now it is widely accepted that the new idea of 1-form symmetry, which is based on the existence of co-dimension-2 topological operators, is a generalization of the old idea of center symmetry. I'll...
My talk consists of two parts. In the first part, I will discuss a conformal bootstrap study of three dimensional Quantum Electrodynamics coupled to four flavors of electrons. The model is a classic example of a strongly coupled gauged quantum field theory and is believed to have a conformal low-energy phase, while its critical parameters lacks a conclusive answer. We find that the scaling...
I will discuss 4d scattering amplitudes in UV complete quantum field theories (QFTs). I will show how the a-anomaly describing its UV fixed point is related to parameters describing the scattering amplitude via unitarity. I will then present various numerical non-perturbative bounds.
The S-matrix bootstrap is a program where one uses the general principles of analyticity, crossing symmetry and unitarity of scattering amplitudes to study the allowed space of quantum field theories. In this talk I will consider the two photon to two photon scattering amplitude and explain how we can use numerical S-matrix bootstrap methods to derive non-perturbative bounds on Wilson...
