Tracing the Origin of the “Freely Chosen Numbers” Appearing in the Laws of Nature

An international research team including Yuya Kusuki, Visiting Scientist at iTHEMS (Associate Professor, Institute for Advanced Study, Kyushu University), analyzed a situation in which two conformal field theories are connected through an interface.

The researchers showed that, by appropriately extracting the response to a small deformation of the interface, one can obtain a local operator that captures the difference between the two theories. They also provided an explicit method for constructing such operators.

This result lends support to the conjecture that quantum gravity does not admit continuous parameters that can be freely chosen from the outside, and is expected to contribute to a deeper understanding of fundamental issues in quantum gravity.

For further details, please see the press release from Kyushu University.