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Caltech

High Energy Theory Seminar

Friday, May 22, 2026
11:00am to 12:00pm
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Online and In-Person Event
Strings Attached: the Confining Flux Tube as a Conformal Defect
Barak Gabai, EPFL,

We recently initiated the study of flux tubes in confining gauge theories placed in a rigid Andi-de Sitter (AdS) background, which serves as an infrared regulator. This setup provides a controlled arena to probe a central question in confinement: how the effective string worldsheet degrees of freedom emerge from the underlying UV gauge theory. Varying the AdS radius from large to small interpolates between a flat-space confining string and a weakly coupled string-like object bound by the AdS gravitational potential. In practice, the flux tube is realized as a Wilson loop inserted at the AdS boundary, which behaves as a conformal defect. In this talk, I will explain what we have learned so far about this setup.

The talk is in 469 Lauritsen.

Contact [email protected] for Zoom information.