String Theory Seminar - Dr Sanjaye Ramgoolam (QMUL) Seminar

Speaker information

Dr Sanjaye Ramgoolam, Queen Mary University of London. String theory, representation theory, combinatorics. His recent work has largely been in gauge-string duality, in particular the AdS/CFT correspondence, which relates 4-dimensional quantum field theory (QFT) to 10-dimensional string theory. He has developed a mathematical framework based on symmetric groups, Brauer algebras, representation theory, combinatorics, in understanding the map between states in the QFT and states of strings, branes and geometries in the 10 dimensions. A recent theme emerging from these investigations is the role of two-dimensional topological field theories (TFT2) as a structure which captures both the combinatorics and spacetime dependences of correlators in four-dimensional theories. He has also developed simple mathematical models of gauge-string duality in low dimensions, e.g deriving the counting of strings wrapping the two-dimensional sphere from matrix models, which can be viewed as zero dimensional QFT. Some of the mathematical techniques have also been applied to find new counting results for Feynman diagrams in QFT, including the simplest ones: scalar field theory and quantum electrodynamics (QED, which describes photons and electrons).