Thermal CFTs

Conformal field theories (CFTs) play a role in a variety of phenomena: they are the fixed points of RG flows, show up routinely in string theory, model phase transitions in condensed matter, and provide a dual description of gravitational processes through the AdS/CFT correspondence. Since black holes in an AdS background are dual to thermal CFT states and condensed matter phase transitions are commonly probed at nonzero temperatures, it is important to understand how CFTs behave in thermal states. Nevertheless, introductions to CFTs usually focus on the zero-temperature case. In this reading group, we will work towards a better understanding of thermal CFTs. Concretely, we plan to discuss the role of thermal CFTs in holography, the thermal bootstrap, and thermalisation, as well as the ambient space formalism (which is designed specifically to exploit the constraints imposed by conformal invariance in thermal states).