Time and Location:

Wednesdays at 1:00pm in 54 / 8033 (8B)

Format of the string theory seminars:

1) 20min student session
2) Seminar itself 1hr + questions

Schedule

Semester 1 

08/09/26 - [Note the unusual day] - Ben Suzzoni

23/09/26 - Vijay Nenmeli (Edinburgh)

30/09/26 - Roberto Emparan (ICCUB)

07/10/26 - Prahar Mitra (Southampton)

14/10/26 - Silvia Georgescu (King's college)

21/10/26 - Susha Parameswaran (Liverpool)

28/10/26 - Klaas Parmentier (Cambridge)

04/11/26 - Julián H. Toro (U. Buenos Aires)

11/11/26 - 

18/11/26 - Cristoforo Iossa (Geneva U.)

25/11/26 - 

02/12/26 - 

09/12/26 - no seminar [STAG Colloquium]

[Winter break: 13 Dec 2025 - 3 Jan 2026]

06/01/27 - 

[Exam period: 11 - 23 Jan 2026]

Semester 2 

27/01/26 - 

03/02/26 - 

10/02/26 - 

17/02/26 - 

24/02/26 - 

03/03/26 - 

10/03/26 -

17/03/26 - 

[Spring break: 21 March 2026 through 11 April 2026]

14/04/26 - 

21/04/26 -

28/04/26 - 

05/05/26 - 

12/05/26 - 

[Exam period 17 May 2026 - 5 June 2026]

Titles and Abstracts (reverse chronological order):

Ben Suzzoni: Conformal Defects in Neural Network Field Theories

Abstract: Neural network field theory has become a fruitful formalism for constructing quantum field theories by trading the path integral with a better behaved statistical integral over neural network parameters. A couple of years ago, it was shown that this formalism can be used to engineer conformal field theories too. In this talk, I will present an extension of this formalism, valid in the presence of a defect, which we call Neural Network Defect Conformal Field Theory (nn-dCFT). I will outline the motivations for engineering such field theories and demonstrate how to construct them from neural networks. The talk will conclude with a couple of examples and further directions.