Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime and apply holographic techniques to study the AdS/CFT correspondence.

Introduction

The talks on QFT and AdS/CFT will be delivered by Mr. Sarthak Talukdar, incoming PhD candidate at King’s College London. He has worked on numerous research projects, such as String Theory for his Bachelor’s thesis, and recently published a paper about the applications of Group Theory techniques in Physics.

These will cover the following topics and will roughly span 6 hours.

  1. Introduction to Scalar Field Theory: 1.5 hrs
    KG eqn and its solution, Perturbation theory, Feynman diagrams

  2. Introduction to Conformal Field Theory: 1.5 hrs
    Conformal symmetry and its generators, Ward identities, Operator Product expansion.

  3. Witten’s paper on Ads CFT (Anti de Sitter space and Holography): 1.5 hrs
    AdS CFT derivation from propagator

  4. Ryu Takayanagi Formulation (Entanglement entropy in Ads CFT)— Recent Dirac medal winning thing

Pre-requisite

Basic GR, familiarity with Einstein convention. Basic Quantum Mechanics. There will be some take-home problems after first two lectures. People should try them before coming for the next two.

The first lecture does not require GR as a prerequisite and will be accessible to those who have studied Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

Abstract

To motivate Quantum Field Theory in two popular ways:

  1. Using Second Quantization (Will give examples from HEP perspective)

  2. Using Path Integral (Will give examples from Statistical Mechanics perspective)

Topics to be covered

Classical Field Theory, Quantization condition, Green’s Function, Interactions, Perturbation Theory, Feynman Diagrams, Renormalization.

Target Audience: Sophomores, Juniors and Seniors