UK-QFT VIII

Session

Session 2

28 Nov 2019, 13:45

Seminar Room 3, Prideaux Building, St Thomas' Campus (King's College London)

Conveners

Session 2

• Dries Seynaeve (King’s College London)

6. Integrating the path integral

Dr Paul Saffin (University of Nottingham)

28/11/2019, 13:45

Talk

The path integral gives a very useful framework for understanding quantum mechanics, but actually evaluating it can be tricky. We shall review some recent progress on a method to perform the integration of the real-time path path integral using Picard-Lefschetz techniques.

14. Integrable sigma models and RG flow

Nat Levine (Imperial College London)

28/11/2019, 14:15

Talk

It is often conjectured that integrable 2d sigma models should be renormalizable (with only finitely many running couplings). After introducing integrability and sigma models, I will explain the intuition behind this conjecture. Although there is no general proof, it has been checked in various non-trivial examples at the leading 1-loop order. I will present recent work where we ask the...

5. Fermions and the spontaneous breaking of scale invariance

Charlie Cresswell-Hogg (University of Sussex)

28/11/2019, 14:45

Talk

We present the first example of the Bardeen-Moshe-Bander phenomenon in a purely fermionic relativistic quantum field theory. In this talk I will give an overview of the phenomenon, in which a scale invariant theory may nonetheless have massive excitations due to strong coupling effects, before explaining how this situation arises in a purely fermionic field theory: a less symmetric version of...