TASI Lectures on the Conformal Bootstrap

Abstract

These notes are from courses given at TASI and the Advanced Strings School in summer 2015. Starting from principles of quantum field theory and the assumption of a traceless stress tensor, we develop the basics of conformal field theory, including conformal Ward identities, radial quantization, reflection positivity, the operator product expansion, and conformal blocks. We end with an introduction to numerical bootstrap methods, focusing on the 2d and 3d Ising models.