The conformal bootstrap: Theory, numerical techniques, and applications

Conformal field theories have been long known to describe the fascinating universal physics of scale invariant critical points. They describe continuous phase transitions in fluids, magnets, and numerous other materials, while at the same time sit at the heart of our modern understanding of quantum...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Reviews of modern physics 2019-01, Vol.91 (1), p.015002, Article 015002
Main Authors: Poland, David, Rychkov, Slava, Vichi, Alessandro
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Computational fluid dynamics
Convexity
Critical point
Field theory
General Physics
High Energy Physics - Lattice
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
High Energy Physics - Theory
Ising model
Magnets
Mathematical models
Optimization
Phase transitions
Physics
Quantum field theory
Quantum theory
Simulation
Supersymmetry
Three dimensional models
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Summary:Conformal field theories have been long known to describe the fascinating universal physics of scale invariant critical points. They describe continuous phase transitions in fluids, magnets, and numerous other materials, while at the same time sit at the heart of our modern understanding of quantum field theory. For decades it has been a dream to study these intricate strongly coupled theories nonperturbatively using symmetries and other consistency conditions. This idea, called the conformal bootstrap, saw some successes in two dimensions but it is only in the last ten years that it has been fully realized in three, four, and other dimensions of interest. This renaissance has been possible due to both significant analytical progress in understanding how to set up the bootstrap equations and the development of numerical techniques for finding or constraining their solutions. These developments have led to a number of groundbreaking results, including world-record determinations of critical exponents and correlation function coefficients in the Ising and O(N) models in three dimensions. This article will review these exciting developments for newcomers to the bootstrap, giving an introduction to conformal field theories and the theory of conformal blocks, describing numerical techniques for the bootstrap based on convex optimization, and summarizing in detail their applications to fixed points in three and four dimensions with no or minimal supersymmetry.
ISSN:0034-6861
1539-0756
DOI:10.1103/RevModPhys.91.015002