Conformal Field Theory and Its Application to Strings
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Simulating Quantum Field Theory with a Quantum Computer
Simulating quantum field theory with a quantum computer John Preskill Lattice 2018 28 July 2018 This talk has two parts (1) Near-term prospects for quantum computing. (2) Opportunities in quantum simulation of quantum field theory. Exascale digital computers will advance our knowledge of QCD, but some challenges will remain, especially concerning real-time evolution and properties of nuclear matter and quark-gluon plasma at nonzero temperature and chemical potential. Digital computers may never be able to address these (and other) problems; quantum computers will solve them eventually, though I’m not sure when. The physics payoff may still be far away, but today’s research can hasten the arrival of a new era in which quantum simulation fuels progress in fundamental physics. Frontiers of Physics short distance long distance complexity Higgs boson Large scale structure “More is different” Neutrino masses Cosmic microwave Many-body entanglement background Supersymmetry Phases of quantum Dark matter matter Quantum gravity Dark energy Quantum computing String theory Gravitational waves Quantum spacetime particle collision molecular chemistry entangled electrons A quantum computer can simulate efficiently any physical process that occurs in Nature. (Maybe. We don’t actually know for sure.) superconductor black hole early universe Two fundamental ideas (1) Quantum complexity Why we think quantum computing is powerful. (2) Quantum error correction Why we think quantum computing is scalable. A complete description of a typical quantum state of just 300 qubits requires more bits than the number of atoms in the visible universe. Why we think quantum computing is powerful We know examples of problems that can be solved efficiently by a quantum computer, where we believe the problems are hard for classical computers. -
Conformal Symmetry in Field Theory and in Quantum Gravity
universe Review Conformal Symmetry in Field Theory and in Quantum Gravity Lesław Rachwał Instituto de Física, Universidade de Brasília, Brasília DF 70910-900, Brazil; [email protected] Received: 29 August 2018; Accepted: 9 November 2018; Published: 15 November 2018 Abstract: Conformal symmetry always played an important role in field theory (both quantum and classical) and in gravity. We present construction of quantum conformal gravity and discuss its features regarding scattering amplitudes and quantum effective action. First, the long and complicated story of UV-divergences is recalled. With the development of UV-finite higher derivative (or non-local) gravitational theory, all problems with infinities and spacetime singularities might be completely solved. Moreover, the non-local quantum conformal theory reveals itself to be ghost-free, so the unitarity of the theory should be safe. After the construction of UV-finite theory, we focused on making it manifestly conformally invariant using the dilaton trick. We also argue that in this class of theories conformal anomaly can be taken to vanish by fine-tuning the couplings. As applications of this theory, the constraints of the conformal symmetry on the form of the effective action and on the scattering amplitudes are shown. We also remark about the preservation of the unitarity bound for scattering. Finally, the old model of conformal supergravity by Fradkin and Tseytlin is briefly presented. Keywords: quantum gravity; conformal gravity; quantum field theory; non-local gravity; super- renormalizable gravity; UV-finite gravity; conformal anomaly; scattering amplitudes; conformal symmetry; conformal supergravity 1. Introduction From the beginning of research on theories enjoying invariance under local spacetime-dependent transformations, conformal symmetry played a pivotal role—first introduced by Weyl related changes of meters to measure distances (and also due to relativity changes of periods of clocks to measure time intervals). -
Twenty Years of the Weyl Anomaly
CTP-TAMU-06/93 Twenty Years of the Weyl Anomaly † M. J. Duff ‡ Center for Theoretical Physics Physics Department Texas A & M University College Station, Texas 77843 ABSTRACT In 1973 two Salam prot´eg´es (Derek Capper and the author) discovered that the conformal invariance under Weyl rescalings of the metric tensor 2 gµν(x) Ω (x)gµν (x) displayed by classical massless field systems in interac- tion with→ gravity no longer survives in the quantum theory. Since then these Weyl anomalies have found a variety of applications in black hole physics, cosmology, string theory and statistical mechanics. We give a nostalgic re- view. arXiv:hep-th/9308075v1 16 Aug 1993 CTP/TAMU-06/93 July 1993 †Talk given at the Salamfest, ICTP, Trieste, March 1993. ‡ Research supported in part by NSF Grant PHY-9106593. When all else fails, you can always tell the truth. Abdus Salam 1 Trieste and Oxford Twenty years ago, Derek Capper and I had embarked on our very first post- docs here in Trieste. We were two Salam students fresh from Imperial College filled with ideas about quantizing the gravitational field: a subject which at the time was pursued only by mad dogs and Englishmen. (My thesis title: Problems in the Classical and Quantum Theories of Gravitation was greeted with hoots of derision when I announced it at the Cargese Summer School en route to Trieste. The work originated with a bet between Abdus Salam and Hermann Bondi about whether you could generate the Schwarzschild solution using Feynman diagrams. You can (and I did) but I never found out if Bondi ever paid up.) Inspired by Salam, Capper and I decided to use the recently discovered dimensional regularization1 to calculate corrections to the graviton propaga- tor from closed loops of massless particles: vectors [1] and spinors [2], the former in collaboration with Leopold Halpern. -
Entanglement, Conformal Field Theory, and Interfaces
Entanglement, Conformal Field Theory, and Interfaces Enrico Brehm • LMU Munich • [email protected] with Ilka Brunner, Daniel Jaud, Cornelius Schmidt Colinet Entanglement Entanglement non-local “spooky action at a distance” purely quantum phenomenon can reveal new (non-local) aspects of quantum theories Entanglement non-local “spooky action at a distance” purely quantum phenomenon can reveal new (non-local) aspects of quantum theories quantum computing Entanglement non-local “spooky action at a distance” purely quantum phenomenon monotonicity theorems Casini, Huerta 2006 AdS/CFT Ryu, Takayanagi 2006 can reveal new (non-local) aspects of quantum theories quantum computing BH physics Entanglement non-local “spooky action at a distance” purely quantum phenomenon monotonicity theorems Casini, Huerta 2006 AdS/CFT Ryu, Takayanagi 2006 can reveal new (non-local) aspects of quantum theories quantum computing BH physics observable in experiment (and numerics) Entanglement non-local “spooky action at a distance” depends on the base and is not conserved purely quantum phenomenon Measure of Entanglement separable state fully entangled state, e.g. Bell state Measure of Entanglement separable state fully entangled state, e.g. Bell state Measure of Entanglement fully entangled state, separable state How to “order” these states? e.g. Bell state Measure of Entanglement fully entangled state, separable state How to “order” these states? e.g. Bell state ● distillable entanglement ● entanglement cost ● squashed entanglement ● negativity ● logarithmic negativity ● robustness Measure of Entanglement fully entangled state, separable state How to “order” these states? e.g. Bell state entanglement entropy Entanglement Entropy B A Entanglement Entropy B A Replica trick... Conformal Field Theory string theory phase transitions Conformal Field Theory fixed points in RG QFT invariant under holomorphic functions, conformal transformation Witt algebra in 2 dim. -
8.821 String Theory Fall 2008
MIT OpenCourseWare http://ocw.mit.edu 8.821 String Theory Fall 2008 For information about citing these materials or our Terms of Use, visit: http://ocw.mit.edu/terms. 8.821 F2008 Lecture 11: CFT continued; geometry of AdS Lecturer: McGreevy October 17, 2008 In this session, we are going to talk about the following topics. 1. We are making a few comments about CFT. 2. We are discussing spheres and hyperboloids. 3. Finally we are focusing on Lorentzian AdS and its boundary. 1 Conformal Symmetry 1.1 Weyl anomaly Quantumly, conformal symmetry in a curved space (with even number of dimensions) could be anomalous, that is ds2 → Ω(x)ds2 could be no longer a symmetry of the full quantum theory. This µ anomaly can be evaluated from the following diagram with operator Tµ inserted at the left vertex. Figure 1: A contribution to the Weyl anomaly. The conformal anomaly signals a nonzero value for the trace of the energy-momentum tensor. In a curved spacetime, it is related to the curvature: µ D/2 Tµ ∼ R 1 where R denotes some scalar contractions of curvature tensors and D is the number of spacetime dimensions; the power is determined by dimensional analysis. For the special case of D = 2, this is c T µ = − R(2) (1) µ 12 where R(2) is the Ricci scalar in two dimensions and c is the central charge of the Virasoro algebra µ of the 2d CFT. Also in D = 4, the anomaly is given by Tµ = aW + cGB where W and B are defined as 1 W = (Weyl tensor)2 = R....R − 2R..R + R2 (2) ... -
Introduction to Conformal Field Theory and String
SLAC-PUB-5149 December 1989 m INTRODUCTION TO CONFORMAL FIELD THEORY AND STRING THEORY* Lance J. Dixon Stanford Linear Accelerator Center Stanford University Stanford, CA 94309 ABSTRACT I give an elementary introduction to conformal field theory and its applications to string theory. I. INTRODUCTION: These lectures are meant to provide a brief introduction to conformal field -theory (CFT) and string theory for those with no prior exposure to the subjects. There are many excellent reviews already available (or almost available), and most of these go in to much more detail than I will be able to here. Those reviews con- centrating on the CFT side of the subject include refs. 1,2,3,4; those emphasizing string theory include refs. 5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13 I will start with a little pre-history of string theory to help motivate the sub- ject. In the 1960’s it was noticed that certain properties of the hadronic spectrum - squared masses for resonances that rose linearly with the angular momentum - resembled the excitations of a massless, relativistic string.14 Such a string is char- *Work supported in by the Department of Energy, contract DE-AC03-76SF00515. Lectures presented at the Theoretical Advanced Study Institute In Elementary Particle Physics, Boulder, Colorado, June 4-30,1989 acterized by just one energy (or length) scale,* namely the square root of the string tension T, which is the energy per unit length of a static, stretched string. For strings to describe the strong interactions fi should be of order 1 GeV. Although strings provided a qualitative understanding of much hadronic physics (and are still useful today for describing hadronic spectra 15 and fragmentation16), some features were hard to reconcile. -
On the Limits of Effective Quantum Field Theory
RUNHETC-2019-15 On the Limits of Effective Quantum Field Theory: Eternal Inflation, Landscapes, and Other Mythical Beasts Tom Banks Department of Physics and NHETC Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ 08854 E-mail: [email protected] Abstract We recapitulate multiple arguments that Eternal Inflation and the String Landscape are actually part of the Swampland: ideas in Effective Quantum Field Theory that do not have a counterpart in genuine models of Quantum Gravity. 1 Introduction Most of the arguments and results in this paper are old, dating back a decade, and very little of what is written here has not been published previously, or presented in talks. I was motivated to write this note after spending two weeks at the Vacuum Energy and Electroweak Scale workshop at KITP in Santa Barbara. There I found a whole new generation of effective field theorists recycling tired ideas from the 1980s about the use of effective field theory in gravitational contexts. These were ideas that I once believed in, but since the beginning of the 21st century my work in string theory and the dynamics of black holes, convinced me that they arXiv:1910.12817v2 [hep-th] 6 Nov 2019 were wrong. I wrote and lectured about this extensively in the first decade of the century, but apparently those arguments have not been accepted, and effective field theorists have concluded that the main lesson from string theory is that there is a vast landscape of meta-stable states in the theory of quantum gravity, connected by tunneling transitions in the manner envisioned by effective field theorists in the 1980s. -
Effective Conformal Descriptions of Black Hole Entropy
Entropy 2011, 13, 1355-1379; doi:10.3390/e13071355 OPEN ACCESS entropy ISSN 1099-4300 www.mdpi.com/journal/entropy Article Effective Conformal Descriptions of Black Hole Entropy Steven Carlip Department of Physics, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA 95616, USA; E-Mail: [email protected]. Received: 1 July 2011; in revised form: 12 July 2011 / Accepted: 19 July 2011 / Published: 20 July 2011 Abstract: It is no longer considered surprising that black holes have temperatures and entropies. What remains surprising, though, is the universality of these thermodynamic properties: their exceptionally simple and general form, and the fact that they can be derived from many very different descriptions of the underlying microscopic degrees of freedom. I review the proposal that this universality arises from an approximate conformal symmetry, which permits an effective “conformal dual” description that is largely independent of the microscopic details. Keywords: black holes; Bekenstein–Hawking entropy; conformal dual 1. Introduction Since the seminal work of Bekenstein [1] and Hawking [2], we have understood that black holes behave as thermodynamic systems, with characteristic temperatures and entropies. A central task for quantum gravity is finding a statistical mechanical description of this behavior in terms of microscopic states. One important clue may come from the surprising “universality” of these thermodynamic properties, which manifests itself in two ways: – The Bekenstein–Hawking entropy A S = (1) 4G takes the same simple form for all black holes, independent of the charges, spin, and even the number of spacetime dimensions. If the action differs from that of general relativity, the entropy is modified, but again in a simple and universal way [3]. -
Distinguished University Professor" at the University of Amsterdam Since 2005, Where He Has Held the Chair of Mathematical Physics Since 1992
Biography Robbert Dijkgraaf Robbert Dijkgraaf (born 1960) has been "Distinguished University Professor" at the University of Amsterdam since 2005, where he has held the chair of mathematical physics since 1992. Since 2008 he is President of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). Robbert Dijkgraaf studied physics and mathematics at Utrecht University. After an interlude studying painting at Amsterdam's Gerrit Rietveld Academy, he gained his PhD cum laude in Utrecht in 1989. His supervisor was the Nobel Prize-winner Gerard 't Hooft. Robbert Dijkgraaf subsequently held positions at Princeton University and at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. His current focus is on string theory, quantum gravity, and the interface between mathematics and particle physics. His research was recognized in 2003 with the award of the NWO Spinoza Prize, the highest scientific award in the Netherlands. Robbert Dijkgraaf has been a visiting professor at universities including Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, and Kyoto. He is on the editorial boards of numerous scientific periodicals, and is also the scientific adviser to institutes in Cambridge, Bonn, Stanford, Dublin, and Paris. Since 2009 he is co-chair of the InterAcademy Council, a multinational organization of science academies, together with Professor Lu Yongxiang, President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Many of his activities are at the interface between science and society. His column in the NRC Handelsblad newspaper is intended for a broad public and deals with science, the arts, and other matters. A collection has been published in his book Blikwisselingen (Prometheus | Bert Bakker, 2008). Robbert Dijkgraaf is dedicated to bringing about greater public awareness of science, for example through his involvement with popular TV science programmes. -
Wall-Crossing, Free Fermions and Crystal Melting
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Springer - Publisher Connector Commun. Math. Phys. 301, 517–562 (2011) Communications in Digital Object Identifier (DOI) 10.1007/s00220-010-1153-1 Mathematical Physics Wall-Crossing, Free Fermions and Crystal Melting Piotr Sułkowski1,2, 1 California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA. E-mail: [email protected] 2 Jefferson Physical Laboratory, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA Received: 15 December 2009 / Accepted: 10 June 2010 Published online: 26 October 2010 – © The Author(s) 2010. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract: We describe wall-crossing for local, toric Calabi-Yaumanifolds without com- pact four-cycles, in terms of free fermions, vertex operators, and crystal melting. Firstly, to each such manifold we associate two states in the free fermion Hilbert space. The overlap of these states reproduces the BPS partition function corresponding to the non- commutative Donaldson-Thomas invariants, given by the modulus square of the topolog- ical string partition function. Secondly, we introduce the wall-crossing operators which represent crossing the walls of marginal stability associated to changes of the B-field through each two-cycle in the manifold. BPS partition functions in non-trivial chambers are given by the expectation values of these operators. Thirdly, we discuss crystal inter- pretation of such correlators for this whole class of manifolds. We describe evolution of these crystals upon a change of the moduli, and find crystal interpretation of the flop transition and the DT/PT transition. The crystals which we find generalize and unify various other Calabi-Yau crystal models which appeared in literature in recent years. -
Introduction to String Theory A.N
Introduction to String Theory A.N. Schellekens Based on lectures given at the Radboud Universiteit, Nijmegen Last update 6 July 2016 [Word cloud by www.worldle.net] Contents 1 Current Problems in Particle Physics7 1.1 Problems of Quantum Gravity.........................9 1.2 String Diagrams................................. 11 2 Bosonic String Action 15 2.1 The Relativistic Point Particle......................... 15 2.2 The Nambu-Goto action............................ 16 2.3 The Free Boson Action............................. 16 2.4 World sheet versus Space-time......................... 18 2.5 Symmetries................................... 19 2.6 Conformal Gauge................................ 20 2.7 The Equations of Motion............................ 21 2.8 Conformal Invariance.............................. 22 3 String Spectra 24 3.1 Mode Expansion................................ 24 3.1.1 Closed Strings.............................. 24 3.1.2 Open String Boundary Conditions................... 25 3.1.3 Open String Mode Expansion..................... 26 3.1.4 Open versus Closed........................... 26 3.2 Quantization.................................. 26 3.3 Negative Norm States............................. 27 3.4 Constraints................................... 28 3.5 Mode Expansion of the Constraints...................... 28 3.6 The Virasoro Constraints............................ 29 3.7 Operator Ordering............................... 30 3.8 Commutators of Constraints.......................... 31 3.9 Computation of the Central Charge..................... -
Calabi-Yau Geometry and Higher Genus Mirror Symmetry
Calabi-Yau Geometry and Higher Genus Mirror Symmetry A dissertation presented by Si Li to The Department of Mathematics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Mathematics Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2011 © 2011 { Si Li All rights reserved. iii Dissertation Advisor: Professor Shing-Tung Yau Si Li Calabi-Yau Geometry and Higher Genus Mirror Symmetry Abstract We study closed string mirror symmetry on compact Calabi-Yau manifolds at higher genus. String theory predicts the existence of two sets of geometric invariants, from the A-model and the B-model on Calabi-Yau manifolds, each indexed by a non-negative inte- ger called genus. The A-model has been mathematically established at all genera by the Gromov-Witten theory, but little is known in mathematics for B-model beyond genus zero. We develop a mathematical theory of higher genus B-model from perturbative quantiza- tion techniques of gauge theory. The relevant gauge theory is the Kodaira-Spencer gauge theory, which is originally discovered by Bershadsky-Cecotti-Ooguri-Vafa as the closed string field theory of B-twisted topological string on Calabi-Yau three-folds. We generalize this to Calabi-Yau manifolds of arbitrary dimensions including also gravitational descen- dants, which we call BCOV theory. We give the geometric description of the perturbative quantization of BCOV theory in terms of deformation-obstruction theory. The vanishing of the relevant obstruction classes will enable us to construct the higher genus B-model. We carry out this construction on the elliptic curve and establish the corresponding higher genus B-model.