Boundary and Defect Conformal Field Theory: Open Problems and Applications
Organisers: Matthew Buican (Queen Mary University of London) and Andrew O'Bannon (University of Southampton)
The past 5 to 10 years have seen a resurgence of Boundary Conformal Field Theory (BCFT) and Defect Conformal Field Theory (DCFT), particularly in higher dimensions, and on two fronts. First are formal developments, such as integrability, bootstrap, c-theorems, holography, supersymmetry, and more. Second are novel applications, to entanglement entropy, topological insulators, QCD, and more.
However, progress has come largely from groups working independently. The time is ripe for a substantive dialogue on existing problems and promising new research directions, both formal and applied, which could catalyze the field, with potential impacts from cosmology to condensed matter to particle physics.
The purpose of this two-day intensive workshop is therefore to bring together a diverse group of leading theorists in the study of BCFT and DCFT, from the formal/mathematical to the applied, to forge collaborations between different areas, to connect those with problems to those with solutions, to identify common themes and challenges, to further develop promising approaches, and to search for new applications.
The workshop will take place at Chicheley Hall, in Buckinghamshire, UK. For travel information to and from the venue, please visit
the Royal Society's webpage with directions to Chicheley Hall
Participants:
Natan Andrei (Rutgers University) talk slides
Agnese Bissi (Harvard University) talk slides
Matthew Buican (Queen Mary University of London)
John Cardy (University of California at Berkeley and University of Oxford) talk slides
Patrick Dorey (University of Durham) talk slides
Nadav Drukker (King's College London) talk slides
Johanna Erdmenger (University of Wuerzburg) talk slides
Daniel Friedan (Rutgers University and Iceland University) talk slides
Dmitri Fursaev (Dubna State University) talk slides
Anatoly Konechny (Henriot-Watt University and Maxwell Institute, Edinburgh) talk slides
Charlotte Kristjansen (Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen) talk slides
Yu Nakayama (Rikkyo University) talk slides
Andrew O'Bannon (University of Southampton)
Shinsei Ryu (University of Chicago) talk slides
Cornelius Schmidt-Colinet (Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich) talk slides
Volker Schomerus (DESY Hamburg) talk slides
Christoph Schweigert (University of Hamburg) talk slides
Balt van Rees (University of Durham) talk slides
Gerard Watts (King's College London) talk slides
This workshop is funded by a generous grant from the Royal Society.
