PIMS Network Wide Colloquium: Sourav Chatterjee

The most intensely studied models of quantum gravity converge to metrics of negative curvature in the semiclassical limit. However, Einstein’s theory of gravity posits a positive curvature metric, and the gravity in our universe is believed to be of positive curvature. The main reason why negative curvature has been the center of attention is that it is mathematically tractable. Positive curvature models of quantum gravity suffer from a well-known “wrong sign problem in the conformal factor”, which makes it far less mathematically tractable. There has been a recent surge of interest in a particular positive curvature model, known as “timelike” or “imaginary” Liouville field theory, because it has partly yielded to mathematical investigation. After giving a gentle introduction to the area, I will talk about some of my recent results on this and open questions (that are still beyond the reach of AI).