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Professor Jesse Thaler (MIT / IAIFI)
Wednesday 29 April 2026, 16:00-17:00
Descending into the Modular Bootstrap
- 👤 Speaker: Professor Jesse Thaler (MIT / IAIFI)
- 📅 Date & Time: Wednesday 29 April 2026, 16:00 - 17:00
- 📍 Venue: MR3
Abstract
The modular bootstrap has been a powerful tool for carving out the landscape of allowed two-dimensional conformal field theories (CFTs). In this colloquium, I describe a complementary approach to standard modular bootstrap bounds: using modern machine learning strategies to actively search for CFT spectra that yield a valid torus partition function. Using insights from statistical inference and a custom singular-value-based optimizer, I present evidence for an obstruction to finding CFTs with small central charge and large spectral gaps, and I speculate on what this might imply for the structure of the CFT landscape. Along the way, I reflect on “centaur” approaches to theoretical physics, where human physicists and artificial intelligence collaborate to explore spaces of theories that would be difficult to navigate alone.
Series This talk is part of the Theoretical Physics Colloquium series.
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