String Theory seminar - Tarek Anous Seminar

Abstract: A certain class of irrelevant deformations of two dimensional quantum field theories have received some interest over the past few years, since they can surprisingly be exactly solved. The lore behind irrelevant deformations implies that they are plagued by short distance ambiguities which proliferate along the RG flow, in seeming contradiction of this fact. In the specific case of the irrelevant $T\bar{T}$ deformation, a simple explanation for this seeming contradiction is that the deformation can be reinterpreted as coupling the QFT to a precise theory of topological gravity. Since we have added no new degrees of freedom, the solubility of the irrelevant deformation becomes manifest. I will give a brief review the $T\bar{T}$ story and will extend it to another set of irrelevant deformations which explicitly break Lorentz invariance, namely the $JT$ deformation. From this we can match results from the literature, from an intuitive starting point.