CFT Seminar

Speaker: Gordon Rogelberg (Yale University)

Time: 2026-01-09 15:30-17:30
Location: 1510, SIMIS
Zoom Meeting ID: 811 9940 5078 Passcode: 974460

Abstract:

Four-point functions of local CFT operators with extremely large scaling dimension probe rich gravitational physics in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence, yet remain difficult to compute perturbatively or constrain with the numerical bootstrap. In this talk, I present results towards a rigorous bootstrap understanding of these objects, focusing on subtleties arising in the heavy limit where the external dimension becomes infinite. These “maximally heavy correlators” are analogous to statistical systems in the thermodynamic limit, and are thus properly characterized only by intrinsic quantities, which we define and classify. We highlight a key parallel between the global dynamics of these correlators and those of the torus partition function of a 2d CFT at large central charge, and discuss examples in $\mathcal{N}=4$ SYM at weak and strong coupling.

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About Speaker:

Gordon Rogelberg is an excellent PhD student at Yale University. His advisor is David Poland. Gordon’s current research focuses on conformal bootstrap and has done many creative works with both analytic and numeric advances.