Soner Albayrak (Amsterdam U)

Date: Tue. April 12th, 2022, 11:30 am-12:30 pm
Location: Zoom

Conformal QED in 3d: The Numerical Bootstrap Approach

The IR fixed point of quantum electrodynamics in three dimensions (QED3) is expected to be gapped for a small global symmetry group and strongly interacting for a large one. Concretely, QED3 with the flavor group SU(N) flows to a free theory for small N and to a conformal one for large N, whereas the critical flavor number is suggested to be anywhere between 1 and 10 by various theoretical and computational methods. This phase space of QED3 is very appealing, as it shows analogues of chiral symmetry breaking and confinement and hence can be used as a toy model for the quantum chromodynamics in four dimensions. Furthermore, QED3 is expected to be a part of 3d fermion-boson duality web, thus a better grasp of this theory is immediately useful for other important 3d models. Finally, QED3 by itself has direct applications in condensed matter systems, particularly in the description of Dirac spin liquids. Despite all these, the available methods to analyze QED3 have been rather insufficient as the theory is strongly coupled. In this talk, I’ll detail how the non-perturbative approach of numerical conformal bootstrap differs from the other methods and what we have learned about QED3 through bootstrap studies.

 

Host: Ozenc Gungor