Strings 2024

 [From my Twitter post about this.] Strings 2024 ended. It was an amazing conference and a lot of good progress was made. Amazing work to everyone involved, and great works in several good directions like chaos theory, QIT, de Sitter, etc. (as usual celestial holography gets cut out.) Some of the talks: 

The first talk was by Miguel Monterro on string compactifications, which was a review talk on supersymmetric vacua, swampland constraints, non-SUSY string vacua among others. The next one was by Wiesner on bottom-top proof of the emergent string and dependence of species on higher-derivative corrections to the Einstein-Hilbert action. I then listened to Chang’s talk (skipping Figuiredo’s talk) on supercharge “Q” cohomologes and fortuitous states and near-BPS black holes. Next was Collier’s talk on 2D dS as a matrix model was fascinating. It was based on his work with Beatrix, Victor and Lorenz on Virasoro minimal string in 2023, and has directions I am interested in reading more on. Blommaert then had a talk on the gravity dual of DSSYK and fake DSSYK temperature relations to real temperature. This was followed by Stanford, Maxfield, Turiaci, Malda, Lorenz and Lin’s discussion on JT gravity, which was a dope review. 

Next day was kicked off by Juan’s talk on BFSS conjecture, followed by a soft theorems talk that I didn’t attend. Then, Cho had a talk on nonworldsheet string backgrounds, followed by a review by Yin and Erler on SFT. I skipped Budzik’s twisted holography talk and listen to Mahajan’s talk on non-perturbative minimal super string duality with matrix integrals. There was then a gong show with Tourkine, Zhong, Tamargo, Biggs, Delgado (on bordisms group which was fascinating), Gesteau, Guo, Ji, Kundu, Levine, Lin, Parihar and Priyadarshi. Next day, Palti talked about emergent kinetic terms in string theory, and an ML talk on CY geometry that I skipped. Norris had a great talk on dS vacua, which I have to review again. I skipped most of the next observational talks except for van Riet’s talk, and skipped the Townhall (on postdoc applications) and the AI talk by Kaplan. The next day (Thu) I skipped the talk by Duffin and attended Casini’s talk on the ABJ anomaly and U(1) symmetry. 

I skipped all the bootstrap talks unfortunately, but was pleasantly greeted with Wong’s talk on 3D gravity and random ensemble of approx CFTS. Next, Vardhan had a talk I did not quite understand, but was followed up by Faulkner’s gravitational algebras talk, which was great and is timely for me, since I’m working on algebras. The last session yesterday was by Chris Akers and Dan Jafferis, which was great but I had internet issues. Today started with Nameki’s talk on generalized symmetries which I did not get either, and had to skip Dumitrescu’s QCD talk. Hansen had an interesting talk on bootstrapping Virasoro-Shapiro amplitudes in AdS which I have to review again. 

I also skipped Bobev’s talk on M2 branes. Yonekura had an interesting talk on non-SUSY branes in heterotic string theory, followed by Minwalla’s talk on large J+E holographic CFTs. I couldn’t attend Dabholkar’s talk on stringy quantum entanglement entropy, nor Beiras’ talk on topological strings. Zhiboedov had a talk on the future of strings, and and the outro was Hirosi and Andy’s discussion on 100 string problems, which was very good and had de Sitter comments. I asked about analytic continuation, but unfortunately my internet connection dropped out as he was answering. On an all, it was a great conference, and a particularly better improvement over Strings 2023 in light of non-stringy talks. Already feeling nostalgic and missing the talks, and this is how amazing these talks are. David Gross + Ahmed Almheiri’s comments were really touching to hear, especially Ahmed’s joke on the UV index being in Planck units. Can’t wait for Strings 2025@NYUAD in Jan 2025, and since Ahmed +Suvrat+Eva et al are hosting, won’t be surprised if it is as good and even better than this one. Thank you everyone @CERN for this wonderful event.