Field theory dualities play a pivotal role in our understanding of the strong coupling regime, where the perturbative expansion is inapplicable and unexpected nonperturbative effects take place. The power of this idea is to relate the strongly-coupled regime of a theory to the weakly-coupled one of another (or even the same theory), where perturbative results can be trusted. A fruitful approach to produce new dualities is to derive them from known dualities, e.g. by reducing the latter to a lower number of dimensions or supersymmetries or by embedding field theory dualities in string theory, where they can be derived from known geometric operations or the duality between the open and closed string sectors. I propose to study the interplay between field theory and string theory dualities in three separate (yet related) contexts: the duality between the gauge and the matter sector in three-dimensional field theories with N=2 supersymmetry, the AdS7/CFT6 correspondence (a duality between seven-dimensional vacua of type IIA string theory and six-dimensional superconformal field theories with N=(1,0) supersymmetry), and F-theory compactifications on Calabi-Yau threefolds, where the S-(self-)duality of type IIB string theory is fully geometrized and physical properties of the compactifications are extracted from the geometry.

Marco Fazzi – INFN MI BICOCCA

Marco Fazzi obtained his PhD in Theoretical Physics from ULB (Brussels, Belgium) in July 2016. Priori to being a recipient of the Fellini Fellowship (based at the Milano-Bicocca INFN unit), he has held a postdoctoral position at the Technion (Israel), and has been visiting researcher at UCSB (US) and the Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel).

He specializes in string theory and supersymmetric quantum field theory. His recent research interests center around AdS/CFT, dualities of supersymmetric QFTs, and the black hole microstates enumeration problem.