Scale ⇒ conformal invariance in 4D, and other QFT lessons

by Ben Grinstein (UCSD)

Thursday 11 Jun 2015, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Berlin

HS3 (Physikdepartment)

It has been known for three decades that unitary relativistic quantum field theories in 2 space-time dimensions that are scale invariant are also necessarily conformal. In this talk I will explain our recent (perturbative) proof of the analogous statement for theories in four space-time dimensions. In the course of the investigation that led to the proof we discovered recursive renormalization group trajectories (limit cycles or ergodicity), which we now understand to describe conformal field theories.