Gravity & Holography

Content

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Description

Time: Tuesdays 11:00 - 13:00

Location for Maxwell Institute students: Bayes Centre, Room 5.46

Module Leader: Matt Walters (Heriot-Watt University)

Teaching Assistant: Hidde Stoffels (Heriot-Watt University), office hours Wednesdays 10:00 - 11:00 in Bayes Centre, Room 5.45

Module Summary

This module will provide an introduction to the holographic correspondence connecting theories of quantum gravity with non-gravitational theories in one fewer spacetime dimension. Over the past 30 years, holography has developed into a powerful tool for studying both fundamental questions about black holes and making concrete predictions in strongly-interacting quantum field theories. We will take a “bottom-up” approach to this correspondence, discussing very general features of gravitational theories and how they can be reinterpreted as statements in the language of conformal field theory.

Tentative lecture schedule:

  • Week 1: Background and motivation
  • Week 2: Introduction to anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime
  • Week 3: Free scalar fields in AdS and at the boundary
  • Week 4: Conformal field theory (CFT) axioms from AdS perspective
  • Week 5: Interacting scalar fields in AdS and anomalous dimensions
  • Week 6: Gauge fields and gravity from conserved CFT operators
  • Week 7: Unitarity bounds and holographic CFTs
  • Week 8: Universal long-distance AdS physics from CFT
  • Week 9: Black holes and CFTs at finite temperature
  • Week 10: Open questions

Assessment

To receive credit for this course, you must attempt THREE of the problem sets posted in the module content (under "Resources") and turn them in by December 10th. These will be evaluated solely based on completion, not whether your solutions are correct.