ESI Programme and Workshop "Higher spins and holography"

• Aim of the programme
• Venue
• Program of the first week (March 11 - 15)
• Program of the second week (March 18 - 22, workshop)
• Program of the third week (March 25 - 29)
• Program of the fourth week (April 1 - 5)
• ESI preprints and post-workshop info
• Confirmed participants
• Useful links
• Contact organizers

Aim of the programme

Higher spins and holography

Higher-spin (HS) gauge theories involve a massless particle of spin two, that is a graviton, together with (typically infinitely many) gauge fields of spin greater than two. An important motivation for their study originates from the long-standing difficulties encountered in the quantisation of gravity, which impel to explore extensions thereof that may have a better UV behaviour. Including fields of spin greater than two is mainly suggested by two observations: the constraints brought by a larger gauge symmetry may remove some UV divergences as supersymmetry does, and string theory does involve fields of arbitrary spin. HS gauge theories are indeed models of intermediate complexity with respect to these examples, and aspire to improve the UV behaviour of supergravity models without resorting to fully-fledged string theory and its plethora of additional particles.

The last years have seen enormous progress in the understanding of such theories: the old negative results against the consistency of HS interactions have been reinterpreted as waymarks that eventually led to a complete interacting classical theory. HS gauge theories have also been holographically related to conformal field theories (CFT). Their conjectured connections to string theory in a tensionless limit started to be explored quantitatively, and some steps towards the first applications outside the realm of gravitational physics have been performed. With the planned programme we want to build upon the recent achievements by bringing together experts in the field to stimulate important progress towards long-term goals like a quantum formulation of HS theories, a derivation of the HS AdS/CFT correspondence and the link to the tensionless limit of string theory.

The recent advancements have been built upon keystones set during a long evolution process. Lagrangians for free gauge fields of arbitrary spin have been obtained by Fronsdal already in 1978, and the emergence of HS symmetries in a high-energy (i.e. low-tension) limit of string theory has been conjectured by Gross in 1988. The first complete non-linear interacting theory on constant-curvature backgrounds has been developed in the beginning of the 1990s by Vasiliev, and a holographic duality relating four-dimensional Vasiliev's theory to three-dimensional conformal field theories has been proposed by Klebanov, Polyakov, Sezgin and Sundell in 2002. Since then HS gauge theories have developed into a rich and lively field. Recent progress affected the foundations of HS gauge theories (classification results, studies of locality of the interactions, fate of the flat-space limit), holographic dualities (holographic reconstruction, tests at the quantum level, low-dimensional examples) and the relation to the tensionless limit of string theory (analysis of the spectrum and symmetries).

The ESI programme is expected to foster further progress on the following developments:

• Foundations and properties of higher-spin gauge theories
• Holography
• Tensionless limit of string theory
• Applications

Venue

The programme and workshop will take place at the Erwin-Schrödinger International Institute for Mathematics and Physics.

Here is practical info for guests.

Schedule of Week 1 (March 11 - 15)

Schedule of Week 1 as PDF

Schedule of Week 1 as table:

All talks and announcements take place in the ESI Boltzmann lecture hall, Boltzmanngasse 9, A-1090 Vienna (with the exception of items in turquoise color).

Schedule of Workshop Week (March 18 - 22)

Schedule of Week 2 as PDF

Schedule of Week 2 as table:

On Wednesday, March 20, there will be a conference dinner starting at 18:15 (Heurigen Hengl-Hasel­brunner) (public transport and PDF map with tramway 38 and with tramway 37)

All talks and announcements take place in the ESI Boltzmann lecture hall, Boltzmanngasse 9, A-1090 Vienna (with the exception of items in turquoise color).

Schedule of Week 3 (March 25 - 29)

Schedule of Week 3 as PDF

Schedule of Week 3 as table:

All talks and announcements take place in the ESI Boltzmann lecture hall, Boltzmanngasse 9, A-1090 Vienna (with the exception of items in turquoise color).

Schedule of Week 4 (April 1 - 5)

Schedule of Week 4 as table:

All talks and announcements take place in the ESI Boltzmann lecture hall, Boltzmanngasse 9, A-1090 Vienna (with the exception of items in turquoise color).

ESI preprints and post-workshop info

The organizers thank all the participants for contributing to a wonderful workshop with their talks, questions, discussions, ideas and anecdotes. We hope to see you back at ESI in the future.

If you have not sent the slides of your talk to Daniel yet please do so.

Guidelines for submissions to the ESI preprint series
(quoted from ESI webpage)

The ESI kindly asks you to send information about preprints/publications where your stay at the institute is acknowledged to secr@esi.ac.at with a CC to director@esi.ac.at as follows:

Subject: ESI Research documentation / Higher_spins_holography_2019

Email content: Author(s) / title / arXiv number or journal reference / Higher_spins_holography_2019

Confirmed participants

Below is a table with invited participants in alphabetical order and their durations of stay:

Useful links

Contact the organizers by e-mail