CCQ Seminar: Andreas Lauchli

Quantum Café is CCQ’s ongoing seminar series: open to all bona fide members of the greater NYC scientific community and held every second week, Quantum Café presents a series of informal, highly interactive talks, typically by external speakers, which present the most interesting recent developments and open questions in our field.

Title: Computational Spectroscopy of Quantum Field Theories

Abstract: Quantum field theories play an important role in many condensed matter systems for their description at low energies and long length scales. In 1+1 dimensional critical systems the energy spectrum and the spectrum of scaling dimensions are intimately related in the presence of conformal symmetry. In higher space-time dimensions this relation is more subtle and not well explored numerically. In this talk we motivate and review our recent effort to characterize 2+1 dimensional quantum field theories using computational techniques targetting the energy spectrum on a spatial torus. We discuss several examples ranging from the O(N) Wilson Fisher theories and Gross-Neveu-Yukawa theories to deconfinement-confinement transitions in the context of topological ordered systems. We advocate a phenomenological picture that provides insight into the operator content of the critical field theories.