(2023-06-20) Seminar: Craig Lawrie -- The Secret Dualities of Class S Theories

Abstract  

4d N=2 SCFTs of class S are associated to punctured Riemann surfaces. Sometimes, theories associated to different punctured Riemann surfaces appear to describe the same physics -- at least insofar as we can compare physical properties such as the central charges, flavor symmetry algebra/group, the spectrum of Coulomb branch operators, and the Schur and Hall--Littlewood indices. I will show whether such a pair of seemingly-dual theories are, in fact, dual by considering their uplift to 6d (1,0) SCFTs. Using the tensor branch effective field theory description, we can answer whether two 6d (1,0) SCFTs are isomorphic, and thus whether the class S descriptions of the torus-compactifications are truly dual.

Speaker

Dr. Craig Lawrie is currently a junior staff at DESY, Hamburg. He started his career with a PhD from King’s College London and later embarked to postdocs at Heidelberg University and University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on geometric engineering of supersymmetric and superconformal field theories from string theory.