Vendredi 22 novembre 2013 à 14h15
Auditoire Stueckelberg, Ecole de Physique

Quantum Field Theory without Lagrangians

Slava Rychkov, CERN/Paris 6

One definition of Quantum Field Theory is as an associative algebra of local operators. Though seemingly formal, this point of view has been extremely successful in the realm of two spacetime dimensions, where many interesting (and experimentally relevant) QFTs can be thus constructed without any reference to Lagrangians. On the contrary, until recently Lagrangians remained crucial in most practical QFT computations in three and four dimensions. Enter the recently revived "Conformal bootstrap"....