Mikefest: A conference in honor of Michael Douglas' 60th birthday

Session

Morning chair: TBC

May 11, 2022, 9:00 AM

Centre de conférences Marilyn et James Simons (Le Bois-Marie)

2. Persistent Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking at High Temperatures (T: 50mn + Q: 10mn)

Prof. Eliezer RABINOVICI (HUJI)

5/11/22, 9:00 AM

I will describe the results of a series of works in which we have found systems for which Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking(SSB) persists to very high temperatures. The systems involve Conformal Field Theories of scalars in fractional dimensions 3<d<3 and for Gauge Theories in d=4. The systems are studied in the limit of various large numbers of species. In the process, we have found...

13. Scale Separation in String Theory (T: 50mn + Q: 10mn)

Prof. Alessandro TOMASIELLO (Univ. Milano Bicocca)

5/11/22, 10:00 AM

Extra spacetime dimensions give rise to KK fields, whose masses should be large and in particular much larger than the cosmological constant. While this can happen naturally in an effective low-energy theory, it is not the case for most known vacuum solutions of ten-or eleven-dimensional supergravity. We review efforts to find vacua that resolve this tension and recent general bounds on KK masses.

14. Truncated Affine Rozansky-Witten Models as Extended TQFTs (T: 50mn + Q: 10mn)

Prof. Ilka BRUNNER (Univ. München)

5/11/22, 11:30 AM

Mathematicians formulate fully extended d-dimensional TQFTs in terms of functors between a higher category of bordism and suitable target categories. Furthermore, the cobordism hypothesis identifies the basic building blocks of such TQFTs. In this talk, I will discuss Rozansky Witten models with affine targets, also known as 3-dimensional topologically twisted N=4 theories of free...