Basic Conformal Field Theory

January - April '14

With a little help from Dr. Sujay K. Ashok, this seminar will discuss conformal field theories from the ground up! There is, at the moment, no fixed syllabus or list of topics we'd like to cover. We plan to tailor the topics discussed to reflect our interests over time.

Each meeting will go on for an hour and a half. We meet every Thursday at 9:30 am in Hall 123.

Talks

Date	Speaker	Topic	Notes/References
3rd April	N. Balakrishnan	Operator Formalism: Bosons and Fermions	Ch. 6.3, 6.4 of [1]
27th March	Dr. Sanjit Das	The Weyl Anomaly	Ch. 6 of [4], [5]
20th March	Dr. Vivek M. Vyas	The Heat Kernel and The Trace Anomaly	Ch. 5.A, 5.B of [1]
13th March	Renjan John	Central Charges, the Virasoro Algebra and Radial Quantization	Ch. 6.1, 6.2 of [1]
6th March	M	Conformal Ward Identities and Operator Product Expansions	Ch. 5.2, 5.3 of [1]
20th February	M	The Conformal Group in Two Dimensions	Ch. 5.1 of [1]
13th February	Renjan John	Conformal Invariance and Quantum Fields	Ch. 4.3 of [1], [2]
6th February	Dheeraj Kumar Mishra	Energy-Momentum Tensors and Tracelessness	Ch. 4.2 of [1]
23rd January	Dheeraj Kumar Mishra	The Conformal Group II: Representations in \( d \) Dimensions	Ch. 4.2 of [1], [3]
16th January	N. Balakrishnan	The Conformal Group I: Generators and Their Algebra	Ch. 4.1 of [1]

References

P. Di Francesco, P. Mathieu, D. Senechal: Conformal Field Theory, Springer (1999).
S. Minwalla: Restrictions Imposed by Superconformal Invariance on Quantum Field Theories, Adv. Theor. Math. Phys. 2 (1998), 781-846.
Preprint available at arXiv:hep-th/9712074.
G. Mack, A. Salam: Finite-Component Field Representations of the Conformal Group, Ann. Phys. 53 (1969), 174-202.
N. D. Birrell, P. C. W. Davies: Quantum Fields in Curved Space, Cambridge University Press (1984).
M. J. Duff: Observations on Conformal Anomalies, Nucl. Phys. B 125 (1977), 334–348.