TASI Lectures on the Conformal Bootstrap

By David Simmons-Duffin. 2016

245 citations recorded by the source corpus.

These notes are from courses given at TASI and the Advanced Strings School in summer 2015. Starting from principles of quantum field theory and the assumption of a traceless stress tensor, we develop the basics of conformal field theory, including conformal Ward identities, radial quantization, reflection positivity, the operator product expansion, and conformal blocks. We end with an introduction to numerical bootstrap methods, focusing on the 2d and 3d Ising models.

Subfields: Computational Mechanics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7670bb068814eff2e577470b3952bfc2400ab34b

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In Computational Mechanics

1. A. Eichhorn
2. D. Baumann
3. G. L. Pimentel
4. Hayden Lee
5. S. Rychkov

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

1. C. D. Pueyo
2. A. Eichhorn
3. D. Baumann
4. G. L. Pimentel
5. Hayden Lee
6. A. Joyce
7. S. Rychkov
8. E. Pajer

Citations in the corpus

• The Cosmological Bootstrap: Spinning correlators from symmetries and factorization (2020, background): “(55)This reality condition differs from the standard one imposed in the study of Euclidean CFT, for example in [127].”
• The cosmological bootstrap: inflationary correlators from symmetries and singularities (2018, unknown): “The story is rather different for the “conformal bootstrap” program for CFTs, where by focusing on Euclidean correlation functions, the rules are completely, and even nonperturbatively, well-defined, so a systematic exploration from numerical and analytical points of view becomes possible [47, 48].”
• An Asymptotically Safe Guide to Quantum Gravity and Matter (2018, background): “If it were possible to extend the conformal bootstrap program (Simmons-Duffin, 2016) to a gravitational setting, a search for the corresponding universality class with relevant directions according to Table 2 might answer whether there is a conformal theory behind asymptotically safe gravity.”
• EPFL Lectures on Conformal Field Theory in D ≥ 3 Dimensions (2016, methodology): “David Simmons-Duffin work [42] provides a modern introduction to the “shadow formalism”.”