Thursday, November 21, 2019 - 11:15 to 12:30 Auditorium

This talk is concerned with the question: How can we characterize, find, and solve quantum field theories and many-body systems that exhibit features of quantum chaos? We describe the recently discovered Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model: a quantum mechanical system of a large number of fermions with all-to-all quartic, Gaussian-random, interactions that, remarkably, is chaotic, nearly conformally invariant, and solvable. We contrast this with integrable two-dimensional quantum field theories, such as the Sine-Gordon model. We end with some comments on hopes for a framework to find nearly integrable quantum field theories that are nearly solvable.