Colloquium

Speaker: Natalie Paquette, University of Washington

Title: Koszul duality & twisted holography for asymptotically flat spacetimes

Abstract: Koszul duality has been understood in recent years to characterize order-type defects in twists of supersymmetric field theories. This notion has been generalized, from a physical point of view, by studying couplings between D-branes and closed string theories in the topological string. Computing the D-brane backreaction, and studying the resulting open/closed string duality, is the purview of the twisted holography program. Twisted holography seeks to study supersymmetric sectors of the AdS/CFT correspondence using these methods, and leverage the appropriate generalization of Koszul duality to elucidate the bulk/boundary map. When applying these methods to a topological string configuration on twistor space, one can construct an instance of twisted holography in which a 2d chiral algebra, supported on the “celestial sphere”, is dual to a 4d theory in an asymptotically flat spacetime. This is the first such top-down example of holography in a 4d asymptotically flat spacetime. This talk describes joint work done, variously, with Kevin Costello, Brian Williams, and Atul Sharma.