Events

Dr. Fedor Popov is a Research Assistant Professor at Stony Brook's Simons Center for Geometry & Physics. Prior to this role, he spent 3 years as a postdoctoral researcher at New York University.

Title: Regge’s Inferno

Abstract: We study large-spin operators in conformal field theories (CFTs) in spacetime dimensions d>2d>2 by placing the theory on appropriate pp-wave backgrounds. We show that these geometries admit Heisenberg-group symmetries, and that these symmetries, combined with locality of quantum fields on such spacetimes, impose strong constraints on the asymptotic spectrum in the large-spin limit. The pp-wave backgrounds probe both the small-twist regime, corresponding to the Regge or light-cone bootstrap, and a strongly coupled regime of large twist. Finally, we demonstrate that causality (or the requirement that the energy be bounded from below) leads to a new unitarity bound in 3+13+1dimensions.