Title: Conformal bootstrap: Recent developments

Speaker: Dr. Abhijit Gadde, TIFR, Mumbai

Abstract: Conformal field theories are known to describe the physics of systems at critical points, from the renormalization group point of view they occupy special places in the space of quantum field theories and they also provide a non-perturbative definition of quantum gravity via the AdS/CFT correspondence. In recent years, an abstract approach towards conformal field theory based only on irrefutable physical principals such as locality and unitary, known as conformal bootstrap, has been tremendously successful. To cite some examples, it has produced the best results about the critical exponents of the 3d Ising model, yielded remarkable constraints on theories of gravity and is expected to further our understanding of string theory. I'll give a brief overview of the main ideas and some of the key results.