3–14 Aug 2026
Europe/London timezone
This is the annual bootstrap conference, which will take place in London during the first two weeks of August 2026

Real evolution from imaginary spin

4 Aug 2026, 14:30
30m
Oliver Thompson Lecture Theatre 101 (Tait Building at City St George’s, University of London)

Oliver Thompson Lecture Theatre 101

Tait Building at City St George’s, University of London

Speaker

George Yuzhe Zhou

Description

It is useful to characterize a high energy state in a massive QFT by its particle number densities as a function of particle momenta. We describe how, in massive RG flows starting from a UV CFT, complex spin CFT data defines evolution equations for these densities as a function of the energy of the state. This picture naturally arises when considering the idea of detector matching. Detector operators are non-local operators that provide the analytic continuation of operators to complex spin, and detector matching is the statement that detectors in an IR theory can be matched onto a sum of detectors in the UV. As an explicit example, we present results showing how density evolution and matching works in the 2D Ising model and its deformations. We also present an independent derivation of evolution and matching in the case of integrable models by treating states as a classical gas and employing thermodynamic arguments.

Presentation materials