Details
Organizers: Simone Giombi, Mina Himwich, Silviu Pufu, Zimo Sun
Quantum field theories on spherical geometries are currently a subject of renewed excitement in both high energy and condensed matter physics due to important recent technical progress on several fronts. This workshop will highlight a few different applications of field theories on spheres, including Euclidean theories as well as theories in Lorentzian signature on spatial spheres times time. First, when the field theory is conformal---e.g. at critical points---the sphere free energy is an important measure of the number of degrees of freedom of the theory related to the quantum entanglement entropy. A new numerical approach known as "fuzzy sphere'' regularization has demonstrated remarkable success in characterizing various properties of conformal field theories, including the sphere free energy, and will be an important future tool in this subject. Second, Euclidean theories on spheres are relevant to de Sitter space and cosmology, where recent progress has been made related to quantum gravity on spheres. Third, there are many interesting recent results obtained in supersymmetric theories via localization on the sphere. Combining these results with conformal bootstrap methods has allowed for progress in quantum field theory and string theory, including AdS/CFT holography. The purpose of this workshop is to start a dialogue between experts in the study of various field theory models on the sphere with the hope of new connections between these different communities.