Triangle Seminars

Abstract:
In flat space, four point scattering amplitudes at weak coupling can be fully determined from Lorentz symmetry, unitarity and causality. The resulting scattering amplitude depends on model details only through coupling constants and the particle content of the theory. I will show how the analogous story works in the case of inflationary fluctuations. We found explicit expressions for inflationary three and four-point functions, whose shapes depend on the field content of the theory, and do not depend on the specific inflationary model, as long as the fluctuations minimally break de Sitter symmetry. This ``cosmological bootstrap” is a first step towards classifying all possible shapes of primordial non-gaussianity, which can be searched for in experimental data.

Abstract:
In this seminar I will discuss a recently-found class of RG flows in four dimensions exhibiting enhancement of supersymmetry in the infrared, which provides a lagrangian description of several strongly-coupled N=2 SCFTs. The procedure involves starting from a N=2 SCFT, coupling a chiral multiplet in the adjoint representation of the global symmetry to the moment map of the SCFT and turning on a nilpotent expectation value for this chiral. We show that, combining considerations based on 't Hooft anomaly matching and basic results about the N=2 superconformal algebra, it is possible to understand in detail the mechanism underlying this phenomenon and formulate a simple criterion for supersymmetry enhancement.

Abstract:
I will describe simple models of holography that can display some of the thermodynamics associated to small black holes. These phenomena include negative specific heat and localization on additional dimensions of the geometry. I will also explain how the dynamics of these states should naturally be thought of as partial deconfinement on a submatrix set of degrees of freedom of the model.