Professor Yossef Dothan Memorial Lecture: "New Theoretical Approaches to Strongly-Coupled Gauge Theories"

Professor Shota Komatsu is an Emilio Segre Distinguished Lectures in Physics for the academic year 2024/2025.

Abstract

Understanding the strongly coupled dynamics of Yang-Mills theories is undoubtedly one of the most important challenges in physics. In this talk, I will describe a few approaches that are currently being actively pursued in the community, based on my work and that of others, all of which are inspired in one way or another by recent progress in string theory and formal quantum field theory. A key emerging strategy is to find setups in which some of the important aspects of the dynamics can be studied independently of other aspects. I will also describe surprising connections to condensed matter physics and physics on curved spacetime that have been found in the pursuit of these approaches.