Event



High Energy Theory Seminar: Sphere packing, gravity, and the conformal bootstrap

Tom Hartman (Cornell University)
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I will describe recent progress on the connections between three topics: conformal field theory, the sphere packing problem, and quantum gravity in three dimensions. The link is provided by a technique known as the modular bootstrap. This gives insight into an old mathematics problem of sphere packing in high dimensions, and leads us toward a new holographic duality involving an ensemble of conformal field theories defined by a random lattice.