A probabilistic approach to Toda Conformal Field Theories

Baptiste Cerclé

Toda conformal field theories form a family of two-dimensional quantum field theories initially introduced in the physics literature. They are natural generalizations of Liouville theory that enjoy, in addition to conformal invariance, an enhanced level of symmetry encoded by W-algebras. In this presentation we will explain how one can study these theories from a mathematically rigorous perspective. For this purpose we will describe a probabilistic framework designed to make sense of these models and provide some insight on how the introduction of this framework can help to understand the model. To be more specific, we will prove —we will not enter into much details but rather try to convey the main ideas— that one can compute some basic correlation functions of the theory based on probabilistic tools. Along the proof of this statement we will shed light on some unexpected interplays between probability theory and conformal field theory such as a generalized Brownian path decomposition.

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 All talks  Fall '24: New trends in QFT, modularity, resurgence