Bootstrapping Time: Colliders, Shocks, Strings, and Black Holes

ended

Two pillars of modern physics are Quantum Field Theory (QFT) and General Relativity (GR). Together they describe a vast corpus of phenomena ranging from the smallest scales accessible with modern accelerators to the largest distances observed with modern telescopes. Establishing these frameworks is a triumph of 20th-century physics. Our understanding of both is not satisfactory. On the QFT side, we lack tools to analyze the strong coupling regime. On the GR side, we do not understand how to make it quantum. The insight of holography is that these two problems are deeply connected, in other words, QFT and Quantum Gravity (QG) are different realizations of the same underlying mathematical structure and physical principles. Providing us with this fundamental insight, holography does not tell us what the underlying structure is. The challenge for 21st-century physics is to understand it. The aim of the present proposal is to establish a research team at CERN that: a) will {\it develop new nonperturbative Lorentzian bootstrap methods} as a part of a larger quest of revealing the unifying mathematical structure and physical principles that underlie both QFT and QG; b) use these methods for state-of-the-art {\it computations of real-time physical observables} which are not accessible using conventional methods. This will lead to new insights into the fundamental properties of QFT, QG, and holography which relates the two. The principal novelty of the project is in its focus on the nonperturbative real-time dynamics, as opposed to Euclidean observables which are typically studied using the current bootstrap or other methods. Bootstrap takes fundamental principles of physics, such as causality, locality, and unitarity, and pushes their consequences to the extreme. Combined with insights from holography, bootstrap methods offer an unprecedented set of tools for diving into uncharted territories of QFT and QG.