---

Many physical phenomena such as quark confinement and the fractional quantum Hall effect arise at strong coupling, thus making a perturbative treatment impossible. Occasionally, a good description can nevertheless be found which involves effective degrees of freedom - different from the fundamental ones and adapted to the specific situation at hand. In such a situation one would speak about a duality. In 1+1 or 2 dimensions there is a wealth of dualities, some of which are extremely well understood. In higher dimensions, the best known duality is the celebrated AdS/CFT correspondence, a concrete realization of the holographic principle. The "conformal superspace sigma-models" featuring in the title are a special class of strongly coupled supersymmetric 2D quantum field theories which naturally arise in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence (but also in the theory of disordered systems). As will be discussed, the underlying supergeometry allows for the derivation of exact partition functions but it also leads to a few unusual peculiarities. As an application, we conclude with arguments in favor of a supersymmetric duality which generalizes the well-known bosonization of a Luttinger liquid.

---

Thomas Quella, Universität zu Köln
Hörsaal 3
Contact: not specified