Speaker
Maria Foteini Kallimani and Camilla Lavino
Date/Time
Date(s) - 29/01/2025
11:00 - 12:00
Location
IRIS Building, Room 1.221
Speaker: Maria Foteini Kallimani
Title: Let’s get BUSY
Abstract: In this talk, I will briefly introduce some worldline QFT methods. First and foremost, I will talk about the so called BUSY (bosonic & supersymmetric) particle picture and how it can be used to describe particles of arbitrary spin. Limiting to the spin 1 sector, one recovers Maxwell theory. If there is some time left, I will describe how to introduce color in this picture and recover Yang-Mills theory as well.
Speaker: Camilla Lavin
Title: “What’s a gauge symmetry?”
Abstract: Gauge symmetries are often highlighted as fundamental cornerstones of modern physics. At the same time, it is also often pointed out that gauge symmetries are not a fundamental feature of nature but merely redundancies in our description. Giving a proper definition of notions like local, global, symmetry, and redundancy, it is possible to clarify the confusion. I will use an economic analogy to illustrate these concepts, and then I’ll apply them in more concrete terms in the context of quantum mechanics and electrodynamics. The main result is that global gauge symmetries are real symmetries with observable consequences while local gauge symmetries are redundancies.