Member Seminar

Speaker:An Huang

Title: Quadratic reciprocity from a family of adelic conformal field theories

Abstract: This talk aims to provide a physics framework to understand quadratic reciprocity. Specifically, we consider a deformation of the two-dimensional free scalar field theory by raising the Laplacian to a positive real power. It turns out that the resulting non-local generalized free action is invariant under two commuting actions of the global conformal symmetry algebra, although it is no longer invariant under the full Witt algebra. The deformation is also closely related to dimensional regularization. Furthermore, there is an adelic version of this family of conformal field theories, parameterized by the choice of a number field, together with a Hecke character. Tate’s thesis gives the Green’s functions of these theories, and ensures that these Green’s functions satisfy an adelic product formula. In particular, the local L-factors contribute to the prefactors of these Green’s functions. Quadratic reciprocity turns out to be a consequence of an adelic version of a holomorphic factorization property of this family of theories on a quadratic extension of Q. At the Archimedean place, the desired holomorphic factorization follows from the global conformal symmetry.