28 June 2026 to 4 July 2026
NCSR "Demokritos"
Europe/Athens timezone

The conformal realms of quantum electrodynamics

30 Jun 2026, 16:35
30m
Seminar Room "Themis Paradellis" (NCSR "Demokritos")

Seminar Room "Themis Paradellis"

NCSR "Demokritos"

Speaker

Kostas Filippas (NCSR Demokritos, Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics)

Description

We propose a duality between massive theories in 4D flat spacetime and massless ones on $\mathbb{S}^2\times\mathbb{R}$, where Poincare maps to conformal symmetry. As a primary example, we suggest that QED$_4$ with $N$ flavors is dual, at least at the large $N$ limit, to an Abelian Chern-Simons theory coupled to $2N$ massless fermions and an auxiliary scalar field, in a unit-charge monopole background. To test this, we match the spectra of free fermions in magnetic vacua, between $\mathbb{R}^4$ and $\mathbb{S}^2\times\mathbb{R}$, while, for a certain condition between the coupling constants, the QED$_4$ charge $e$ and the Chern-Simons level $k$, we match the anomalous dimensions coming from fermion self-energy diagrams, at leading order in $1/N$. The map implies that 4D massive asymptotic states correspond to distinct conformal cylinders, each being a boundary for an AdS universe. Hence, we suggest that entangled states in $\mathbb{R}^4$ may be viewed as a theory of wormholes between distinct AdS universes.

Author

Kostas Filippas (NCSR Demokritos, Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics)

Presentation materials