Skip to main content
March 21, 2025 past

PUG Seminar

Whitmore 321

PUG Seminar

Speaker Michael Plesser will be presenting on the requirements of a non-abelian gauge theory.

Title: "Why (Non-Abelian) Gauge Theory?"

Abstract: Combining (flat-space) Lorentz-invariance with quantum mechanics in D=4 you inevitably describe a Quantum Field Theory (QFT), so the widespread interest in QFTs is understandable. Much more mysterious for many students is the passage to gauge theory, which introduces many sophisticated mathematical notions prone to overwhelming the uninitiated. Just as QFT arises as a necessary framework assuming certain basic principles, we will describe reasonable sounding theories for which non-abelian gauge theory is the necessary framework. The concrete statement we will argue is the following: a unitary, local, and Lorentz-invariant theory of massless, self-interacting, spin-1 particles in D=4 is necessarily a non-abelian gauge theory. Time allowing, we may discuss other interesting aspects of gauge theory relevant to my research.

Program

Date Time Speaker Title
2025-03-21 14:00 Michael Plesser Why (Non-Abelian) Gauge Theory?
About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.