Joseph Minahan Fest

Friday 29 Aug 2025, 09:00 → 18:00 Europe/Stockholm

Auditorium 5 (Albano Building 2)

Anton Nedelin (King's College London), Maxim Zabzine (Uppsala university), Konstantin Zarembo (Stockholm University, Nordita)

Venue

Auditorium 5, Albano Campus building 2, Stockholm, Sweden

 

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Date

Aug 29

 

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Scope

The meeting is dedicated to Professor Joseph Minahan on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Bringing together collaborators, students, colleagues and friends, this event honors Joe’s contributions to theoretical physics by exploring the diverse fields he has worked on.

The meeting will cover topics central to Joe’s research: string theory, integrability, supersymmetric gauge theories and localization, and will give ample opportunity for discussions inspired by Joe's scientific work.

 

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Speakers

• Vladimir Kazakov (ENS) 
• Jeffrey Harvey (Chicago U.)
• Igor Klebanov (Princeton U.)
• Charlotte Kristjansen (Bohr Institute)
• Arkady Tseyltin (Imperial College London)
• Alessandro Georgoudis (Queen Mary U.) 
• Anton Nedelin (Kings College London)
• Simon Ekhammar (Kings College London)

 

 

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Eurostrings 2025

The meeting is a satelite event to Eurostrings 2025 which will take place at the same location on August 25-28. The participants of JoeFest are encouraged to participate in the Eursotrings as well. 

 

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Registration

Registration for the JoeFest is done through the page of Eurostrings 2025 conference. There you will be able to choose events you would like to participate in. There is no fee for participation in JoeFest. However if you wish to participate in Eurostrings meeting you should also pay participation fee. 

Register here

Eurostrings 2025 Conference fee payment portal here

 

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Sponsored by:

                             

09:50 Welcome

1 The spectrum of defect ABJM theory

We determine the spectrum of quantum fluctuations in a 1/2​-BPS domain wall version of ABJM theory, thereby enabling the perturbative exploration of the corresponding defect CFT.

Speaker: Charlotte Kristjansen (Niels Bohr Institute)

2 Integrable Regge Trajectories of N=4 SYM

Speaker: Simon Ekhammar (King's College London)

11:00 Coffee Break

3 Integrated correlators and epsilon expansion

In this talk, I will review Joe's work on localization in generic dimensions, with a focus on theories preserving 16 supercharges. Building on this, I will consider the theory in 4-2 epsilon dimensions and show that, at leading order in epsilon, the epsilon expansion of the two-point function in flat space can be obtained directly from localization. If time permits, I will also discuss an intriguing connection to the computation of integrated correlators in N=4 SYM.

Speaker: Alessandro Georgoudis (Queen Mary University of London)

4 From superconformal indices to elliptic integrable systems and back.

In this talk, I will present a systematic construction of elliptic integrable systems from the superconformal indices of 4d N=1 gauge theories, and show how this viewpoint can help us in understanding these theories. After outlining the general procedure, I will recover the Ruijsenaars-Schneider and van Diejen models and introduce several new integrable systems that naturally emerge in this framework. I will then discuss spectral properties guided by insights from the associated gauge theories. I will conclude with a detailed look at a recently proposed family of models on the A2 ​and A3​ root systems, highlighting their structure and open questions.

Speaker: Anton Nedelin (King's College London)

12:30 Lunch

5 Quantum superstrings and supermembranes and AdS/CFT

I will first review some results on semi-classical quantization of M2 branes in AdS4 x S7/Zk in their relation to dual ABGM theory and then discuss recent work on computing 2-loop corrections to world-volume S-matrix in flat-space superstring and supermembrane theory.

Speaker: Arkady Tseytlin (Imperial College London)

6 Dimensional Transmutation and Confinement in Various Models

In 1999, Joe Minahan did very interesting work aimed at finding QCD-like physics from gauge/gravity duality, i.e. deriving the asymptotic freedom and confinement. Somewhat later, the warped deformed conifold background was found, and it incorporates confinement and dimensional transmutation. The corresponding gauge theory is not asymptotically free, but it exhibits logarithmic running in the UV. I will then switch to 1+1 dimensions and show that the two-flavor Schwinger model with the theta-angle equal to pi has QCD-like features as well. In the regime where the fermion mass is much smaller than the gauge coupling, the mass gap becomes exponentially small due to the dimensional transmutation.

Speaker: Igor Klebanov (Princeton U.)

15:30 Coffee Break

7 BPS mass renormalization in pseudo-anomalous heterotic string

I will discuss a one-loop string computation that shows that masses of BPS strings in four-dimensional heterotic string compactifications receive non-zero corrections when the spectrum of the theory contains a U(1) factor with a non-vanishing anomaly from the massless fermion spectrum.

Speaker: Jeffrey Harvey (Chicago U.)

8 Matrix models for protected correlators in N=4 SYM and LLM geometry

I present complex matrix models for studying general protected correlators of various 1/2-BPS operators in N=4 SYM. The 2-point correlators—character, exponential, and coherent state types—naturally relate to Lin-Lunin-Maldacena geometry. This framework enables explicit computation of correlators involving two or three “huge” operators (dimension ∼N^2), as well as combinations of two huge and one “giant” operator (dimension ∼N). We also compute 3-point correlators of two huge operators with a class of small operators (dimension ∼1), finding exact gauge/gravity correspondence with Skenderis-Taylor results. Finally, we uncover a curious link between 1/4- and 1/8-BPS operators and Eguchi-Kawai reductions of the principal chiral sigma model.

Speaker: Vladimir Kazakov (ENS)

17:00 Concluding Remarks