New Methods in Nonperturbative Quantum Field Theory
Coordinators: Ken Intriligator, Anton Kapustin, Zohar Komargodski, Joe Polchinski, Slava Rychkov
Scientific Advisors: Yuji Tachikawa
Quantum field theory has been the fundamental framework of quantum physics for well over half a century, but many open questions remain about its behavior at strongly coupling. In recent years new methods have arisen to address this. The purpose of this program is to develop these methods and the connections between them.
Questions of interest include general constraints on renormalization flows, such as monotonicity, and their relation with entanglement entropy; conformal correlation functions and bootstrap methods; the conformal window in four dimensional gauge theories and the application of conformal theories to model building; exact results in supersymmetric theories, by localization and other methods; relations between field theories in different dimensions; connections with integrability; higher spin gravity theories, and their holographic connection with CFTs.
Some big questions are: Can gauge/gravity duality be derived, for example from the renormalization group? Is there an alternative to the Wilson approach as a framework for QFT, which would better represent dualities and other symmetries? How do we construct the non-Lagrangian QFT's in d=6, which underly many of the dualities of lower-dimensional theories?
There will be an associated conference Quantum Fields beyond Perturbation Theory from Jan 27 - 31, 2014, which will cover recent developments in quantum field theory in a broad way.