• Corpus ID: 250699048

Conformal field theory for particle physicists

@inproceedings{Gillioz2022ConformalFT,
  title={Conformal field theory for particle physicists},
  author={Marc Gillioz},
  year={2022}
}

• M. Gillioz
• Published 19 July 2022
• Physics

This is a set of introductory lecture notes on conformal field theory. Unlike most existing reviews on the subject, CFT is presented here from the perspective of a unitary quantum field theory in Minkowski space-time. It begins with a non-perturbative formulation of quantum field theory (Wightman axioms), and then gradually focuses on the implications of scale and special conformal symmetry, all the way to the modern conformal bootstrap. This approach includes topics often left out, such as subtleties of conformal transformations in Minkowski space-time, the construction of Wightman functions and time-ordered correlators both in positionand momentumspace, unitarity bounds derived from the spectral representation, and the appearance of UV and IR divergences. These notes were created for a graduate class on conformal field theory at the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the University of Bern, taught in the spring semester of 2022. They are aimed at physicists with a good basic knowledge of quantum field theory but without prior experience in conformal field theory. ∗Former affiliation. Current correspondence address: [e-mail]. 1 ar X iv :2 20 7. 09 47 4v 2 [ he pth ] 8 A ug 2 02 2