Dr. Nathan Benjamin, Caltech
Pure gravity and the bootstrap
Location: 1080 Physics Research Building, Smith Seminar Room
Faculty Host: Samir Mathur
Abstract: Unifying quantum mechanics and general relativity is one of the outstanding problems in theoretical high energy physics today. Remarkably, in certain situations, theories of quantum gravity are equivalent to a certain class of field theories called conformal field theories. Unlike in quantum gravity, the “rules” of conformal field theory are well known, and are systematically studied in a program called the conformal bootstrap. Questions in quantum gravity can then be translated into concrete, explicit questions in conformal field theory. I will describe recent results in using this translation to rule out naively healthy theories of quantum gravity in three spacetime dimensions using conformal bootstrap techniques. I will also show new deep connections between conformal field theories and topics in modern mathematics.
Bio: Nathan Benjamin is a Sherman Fairchild postdoctoral scholar at Caltech studying theoretical physics. He is interested in string theory, quantum field theory, conformal field theory, and the AdS/CFT correspondence. He received his SB from MIT in 2013, and his PhD from Stanford University in 2018 under the supervision of Shamit Kachru. After his PhD he was a postdoc at the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science at Princeton University from 2018 to 2021, and at the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics at Caltech starting from 2021.