Apratim Kaviraj joined the institute in October, 2017. He received his PhD from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (2013-2017). His current research involves Quantum Field Theories at or near fixed points in an RG flow. Specifically his interests include the various aspects of general dimension Conformal Field Theories (CFT), that occur in critical phenomena, in AdS/CFT, Supersymmetry, or in critical systems with defects. His research involves modern techniques like the Conformal Bootstrap, as well as more formal approaches (like Feynman diagrams). One of his specific research interests in recent years, has been to understand and establish the Polyakov Bootstrap, in the modern language of Witten diagrams and Mellin space.
One of his recent projects in collaboration with Miguel Paulos, was understanding the connection between Mellin/Polyakov Bootstrap formalism and the usual Bootstrap through the extremal functional approach, for the case of boundary CFTs. While the Polyakov bootstrap begins with a basis of Witten diagrams, the functional bootstrap has a very natural setup implementing the analytic framework of a boundary CFT. In practice, for solving a CFT operator spectrum the former is an easier approach, but suffers from some ambiguities that limit its applicability. These ambiguities can be removed from the connection with Extremal Functionals. This also improves the analytic understanding, the possible AdS/CFT picture, and also makes way for various applications [35,36].
His other recent work, in collaboration with Emilio Trevisani and Slava Rychkov, involves certain disordered theories. Their quenched hamiltonian shows a fixed point, having a hidden supersymmetry and has a duality with lower dimensional CFTs, under some conditions. The project aims at understanding this mechanism, from conformal symmetry and RG perspectives.
In the past he has also worked on Entanglement Entropy, AdS/CFT and holography.