Integrability in Gauge and String Theory 2015
This summer King’s College London, one of the GATIS nodes, hosted a major conference in the field – “Integrability in Gauge and String Theory - 2015” (IGST-2015). The conference took place July 13th-17th and continued a series of annual meetings that were started back in 2005. For years this conference series has been a crucial focal point in the field, bringing together experts on integrability, field theory, holographic dualities and even pure mathematics. Its aim has always been to survey the state of the art in the subject, at the same time bringing together many researchers from around the world and creating a stimulating setting for their interaction.
The current edition was extremely popular and attracted about 180 participants, making it likely the largest conference in Europe in recent years. Additional synergy was due to the young researchers’ school in Durham directly before the conference. The 27 speakers (among them, 3 GATIS fellows) were carefully selected with the help of the advisory board, some slots being filled very close to the event in order to reflect latest results.
The talks covered a wide selection of topics centered on exact results in gauge/string theories. For the spectral problem, the talks of Dmytro Volin and Fedor Levkovich-Maslyuk showcased latest ideas coming from the powerful Quantum Spectral Curve equations. The rapid progress in understanding deformed versions of the most studied gauge/string duality was presented by Radu Roiban, Tim Hollowood and Ben Hoare. Extension of the integrability approach to very intriguing lower dimensional examples was discussed by Bogdan Stefanski.
Moving on to 3-point correlators, the recent exceptional achievement in their all-orders calculation was presented by Pedro Vieira, while Joseph Minahan, Romuald Janik and Shota Komatsu discussed remarkable ideas helping to attack this problem from various sides. Fedor Smirnov illuminated deep aspects of the closely related form factors, while Elli Pomoni explored the 3-point functions in a rather different setting of the 2d conformal theories using AGT-type relations. Tomasz Lukowski outlined applications of the conformal bootstrap for various correlation functions, and Konstantin Zarembo discussed one-point correlators in the presence of a domain wall.
A number of talks were devoted to amplitudes, with Jon Toledo discussing new tools for calculation of related minimal surfaces, Joao Caetano presenting very general all-loop OPE methods, and Lionel Mason giving a deep new perspective from the twistorial approach. We heard about new structures in perturbation theory in related talks by Gabriele Travaglini and Johannes Henn.
Other directions, including localisation methods, dualities and their interplay with integrability, were surveyed by Jaume Gomis, Sanefumi Moriyama, Vasilis Niarchos, and Masahito Yamazaki. A direct formulation of integrability in terms of renowned Yangian symmetries was discussed by Niklas Beisert. The talk of Sergei Lukyanov explored classical/quantum dualities and Simone Giombi discussed general results in CFTs related to RG flow theorems. Finally, Sergei Dubovsky showed applications of integrability-based methods to fully real-world QCD observables.
In addition to the plenary talks, an interactive poster session was organized where younger researchers presented their work. IGST this year also included an outreach event which turned out to be very popular – an inspiring lecture for the general public given by Prof. Jan Plefka, attended by more than 200 people. At the closing of the conference the first ever GATIS awards ceremony was also celebrated. Prizes were handed out to GATIS researchers for the best lecture at a school, best paper in 2014 and best conference talk.
Videos and slides from the conference are available at http://igst15.strongcoupling.org/node/7 .