Monday, 21 May 2018

Mukund Rangamani
Title: Entropy production from superspace inflow
Abstract:

TBA

Shamik Banerjee
Title: The particles at null-infinity
Abstract:

TBA

Tuesday, 22 May 2018

Title: Aspects of Entanglement Evolutions under Local Excitations
Abstract:

In this talk, I will give a summary of our series of works on time evolutions of entanglement entropy for locally excited states in 2d CFTs. We will show that the behaviors change drastically depending on the nature of CFTs, whether they are rational, irrational or chaotic. We present our latest results based on Zamolodchikov's recursion relations. We will also discuss higher dimensional results.

Veronika Hubeny
Title: Entanglement Relations and Bulk Locality
Abstract:

In order to elucidate the recent tantalizing hints at a holographic connection between bulk geometry and boundary entanglement, we explore the nature of geometric proofs of entanglement relations. In particular, we use the bit thread formulation of holographic entanglement entropy to highlight the distinction between strong subadditivity and monogamy of mutual information, arguing that the latter is more deeply rooted in bulk locality.

Sachin Jain
Title: Scattering amplitude in Chern-Simons matter theories
Abstract:

In this talk we shall start with some exact computation large N computation of scattering amplitude in CS matter theories. We'll then discuss how to understand some the results based on symmetry principle such as Dual conformal invariance. Then concentrate on higher point scattering amplitude and discuss BCFW recursion relations to compute higher point tree level amplitude. We then discuss some facts about loop level 6 and higher point scattering amplitudes.

Juan Maldacena
Title: Quantum mechanics and the geometry of spacetime (Infosys-ICTS Chandrasekhar Lectures) - Lecture 1
Abstract:

Black holes are fascinating objects which pose interesting puzzles for quantum physics. Studying these puzzles we are led to quantum mechanical models that describe special black holes as seen from the outside. Extrapolating from these descriptions we are lead to the idea that entanglement can create geometric connections or wormholes. Moreover, quantum teleportation can be interpreted as travelling through the wormhole.

Wednesday, 23 May 2018

Juan Maldacena
Title: The SYK model and Ads2
Abstract:

We will review the Sachdev Ye Kitaev model and describe how it shares some features with nearly extremal black holes.
We also describe the dynamics of nearly extremal black holes.
We will go over different physical phenomena, including chaos, quantum teleportation, etc, and their common manifestation in these two systems.

Gautam Mandal
Title: Bulk dual to SYK from 3D
Abstract:

We construct a bulk dual to the pseudo Nambu Goldstone sector of the SYK model by performing a KK reduction of Einstein gravity in asymptotically AdS(3) geometry.
The KK reduction leads to a Jackiw-Teitelbom theory; the dilaton is identified with the radius of the KK circle. The construction can be extended to Einstein-U(1) Chern-Simons theory whose KK reduction leads to Jackiw-Teitelboim-BF theory. The large gauge transformations of this theory get identified with the Nambu-Goldstone modes of the charged SYK model. The bulk dual correctly reproduces the effective action of these modes, consisting of the Schwarzian and a sigma-model term, as found in Davison et al (hep-th/1612.00849).

Wei Li
Title: Supersymmetrizing the triangle of W algebra, affine Yangian and plane partition
Abstract:

W symmetry underlies the AdS3/CFT2 correspondence with higher spin symmetry. There exists a useful triangle connecting W symmetry, affine Yangian, and plane partition representations. Further, this triangle can serve as the building block of new VOA's and affine Yangians. As an example, I will explain how to construct the N=2 version of this triangle, which gives rise to a new type of affine Yangian and its twin-plane partition representations.

Thursday, 24 May 2018

Juan Maldacena
Title: Making Traversible wormholes Understanding global AdS2
Abstract:

We will review the Sachdev Ye Kitaev model and describe how it shares some features with nearly extremal black holes.
We also describe the dynamics of nearly extremal black holes.
We will go over different physical phenomena, including chaos, quantum teleportation, etc, and their common manifestation in these two systems.

Title: Probing the interior of black hole microstates
Abstract:

I will discuss the question of what is the geometry dual to a typical black hole microstate in AdS/CFT and how the region behind the horizon may be probed by using time-dependent perturbations of the CFT Hamiltonian.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta
Title: The Fissures of Modern Hinduism:  Religion and Historiography (D. D. Kosambi Lectures)
Abstract:

This talk will focus on the transition of Hinduism from a worldview into an ethnic identity, and the intellectual moves that made this possible.

Friday, 25 May 2018

Amos Yarom
Title: New constraints on transport from Schwinger Keldysh theory
Abstract:

After a brief review, I will discuss how a new formulation of a low energy Schwinger Keldysh effective action gives rise to the appearance of an entropy current, Onsager relations, and further constraints on hydrodynamics which are not implied by the either

Suvrat Raju
Title: A Critique of the Fuzzball Program
Abstract:

We explore the viability of fuzzballs as candidate microstate geometries for the black hole, and their possible role in resolutions of the information paradox. We argue that if fuzzballs provide a description of black-hole microstates, then the typical fuzzball geometry can only differ significantly from the conventional black-hole geometry at a Planck-scale-distance from the horizon. However, precisely in this region, quantum fluctuations in the fuzzball geometry become large and the fuzzball geometry becomes unreliable. We verify these expectations through a detailed calculation of quantum expectation values and quantum fluctuations in the two-charge fuzzball geometries. We then examine some of the solutions discovered in arXiv:1607.03908. We show, based on a calculation of a probe two-point function in this background, that these solutions, and others in their class, violate robust expectations about the gap in energies between successive energy eigenstates, and differ too much from the conventional black hole to represent viable microstates. We conclude that while fuzzballs are interesting star-like solutions in string theory, they do not appear to be relevant for resolving the information paradox, and cannot be used to make valid inferences about black-hole interiors.

Shivaji Sondhi
Title: Two variations on the theme of operator spreading
Abstract:

Operator spreading refers to the growth of local operators in spatial support and complexity under unitary dynamics. I will discuss some exact results on operator spreading under local random unitary circuits, how they tie into more general beliefs about how operators spread in different settings, and finally how these beliefs constrain the phase space for finding examples of time translation symmetry breaking.

Juan Maldacena
Title: Black Holes and the Structure of Spacetime (Public Lecture)
Abstract:

Black holes are fascinating objects predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity. Though they were initially viewed as pathological and unphysical solutions, they were later understood to be a solid and generic outcome of the theory. They are objects where the distortion of space and time is so extreme that it defies imagination. Black holes give rise to paradoxes whose resolution requires us to modify our conception of spacetime. We will review how black holes went from being an apparently unphysical solutions to a central tool for discovering new perspectives on the nature of spacetime.

Monday, 28 May 2018

Title: New perspective on bulk reconstruction
Abstract:

I will describe recent advancements which results in a way to reconstruct perturbative bulk physics purely from the CFT data. I will also discuss possible implications for constructing a bulk quantum gravity theory.

Matthias Gaberdiel
Title: AdS3 at the String Scale
Abstract:

In the first part of the talk I will discuss a proposal for the CFT dual of string theory on AdS3 x S3 x S3 x S1. The proposed dual satisfies a number of non-trivial consistency conditions; in particular it matches the BPS spectrum of supergravity that we also determined from first principles. In the second half of the talk, I will explain how the higher spin symmetry of string theory on AdS3 at the tensionless point can be directly understood from a world-sheet perspective.

Tuesday, 29 May 2018

Shiraz Minwalla
Title: Bose Fermi Chern Simons duality in the Higgs Phase (Remote Talk)
Abstract:

It has been conjectured that fermions minimally coupled to a Chern- Simons gauge eld de ne a conformal eld theory (CFT) that is level-rank dual to Chern-Simons gauged Wilson-Fisher Bosons. The CFTs in question admit relevant deformations parametrized by a real mass. When the mass deformation is positive, the duality of the two deformed theories has previously been checked in detail in the large N limit by comparing explicit all orders results on both sides of the duality. In this paper we perform a similar check for the case of negative mass deformations. In this case the bosonic eld condenses triggering the Higgs mechanism. The effective excitations in this phase are massive W bosons. By summing all leading large N graphs involving these W bosons we nd an all orders (in the 't Hooft coupling) result for the thermal free energy of the bosonic theory in the condensed phase. Our final answer perfectly matches the previously obtained fermionic free energy under the conjectured duality map.

Simon Caron-Huot
Title: AdS Locality and the Conformal Bootstrap
Abstract:

Dispersion relations, often called Kramers-Kronig relations, exploit causality to reconstruct the real part of a scattering amplitude from its imaginary (or absorptive) part, which is often easier to measure or compute. In the context of strongly coupled conformal theories, a similar formula reconstructs correlators from essentially kinematical information about a few light operators in the spectrum. I will illustrate in examples how this automatically produces the correlators of a local AdS theory, as a consequence of unitarity of the CFT (positivity of the absorptive part).

Jan De Boer
Title: 20 years of black holes in ads/cft
Abstract:

Since this conference is about 20 years of ads/cft I will review some aspects of black holes in ads/cft and also describe some recent work.

Wednesday, 30 May 2018

Sandip Trivedi
Title: Dynamics of Near-Extremal Black Holes
Abstract:

TBA

Title: Bit threads and holographic monogamy
Abstract:

Bit threads offer a novel perspective on holographic entanglement entropy. Using tools from network theory, specifically the concept of multicommodity flows, we will use bit threads to prove the “monogamy of mutual information” property of holographic entanglement entropies. The proof will lead to a conjecture about the general entanglement structure of holographic states.

Title: Vector space of CFTs
Abstract:

I argue that the space of not necessarily unitary conformal field theories with abelian symmetry forms a vector space over complex numbers. This is done by formulating the CFT consistency condition as factorization of the n-point functions of a certain chosen operator.

Thursday, 31 May 2018

Rajesh Gopakumar
Title: Understanding Mellin Bootstrap
Abstract:

After describing the basics of the conformal bootstrap, based on Polyakov's crossing symmetric approach, formulated in Mellin space, we outline some of the simplifications in this approach. We also discuss the issue of contact Witten diagrams in mellin space and their role.

Justin David
Title: Unitarity and bounds for conformal field theories
Abstract:

We derive two constraints on conformal field theories in 3 and 2 dimensions. The constraints indicate that they arise from unitarity however the derivation does not directly use this property. Finally we examine the chaos bound for conformal field theories in 2 dimensions and show that the bound is violated when the OTO is evaluated on a state which large negative conformal dimensions.

Mikhail Vasiliev
Title: From Coxeter Higher-Spin Theories to Strings and Tensor Models
Abstract:

A new class of higher-spin gauge theories associated with various Coxeter groups will be proposed. The emphasize is on the $B_p$--models. The multi-particle $B_2$--higher-spin theory is conjectured to be associated with String Theory. $B_p$--higher-spin models with $p>2$ are anticipated to be dual to the rank-$p$ boundary tensor sigma-models. $B_p$ higher-spin models with $p\geq 2$ possess two coupling constants responsible for higher-spin interactions in $AdS$ background and stringy/tensor effects, respectively. Consistency of the holographic interpretation of the boundary matrix-like model in the $B_2$-HS model will be shown to demand $N\geq 4$ SUSY, suggesting duality with the $N=4$ SYM upon spontaneous breaking of HS symmetries.

Friday, 01 June 2018

Shiroman Prakash
Title: Tensor Models in d Dimensions
Abstract:

Tensor models define a new large $N$ limit dominated by melonic diagrams. While it seems unlikely that theories with melonic dominance make sense in dimensions greater than $1$, it seems important to confirm this by carefully exploring the range of possibilities for melonic CFT’s, and their relationships to simpler large $N$ theories based on vector or matrix degrees of freedom. In this context we will review some of the work on fermionic and bosonic tensor models in $d$ dimensions over the last year. One positive outcome of these explorations is that it appears possible to study fermionic tensor models in $1$ dimension at finite $N$ via an epsilon expansion, starting from $2-\epsilon$ dimensions.