[phys4phys] Group for Gravitation, Particles and Fields seminar, Friday, 16th of October, 2026

[Igor Prlina]

Dear colleagues,

You are cordially invited to the seminar of the Group for Gravitation, 
Particles and Fields, which will be held on Friday, 16th of October, 
2026, at 11:00 at the Institute of Physics Belgrade, lecture hall 360.

The talk entitled:

Probing Bordism Defects with SymTFT

will be given by Dušan Novičić.

Abstract: There is abundant evidence that global symmetries are not 
allowed to be present in a theory of quantum gravity. This suggests that 
in consistent gravitational theories all symmetries are either gauged or 
broken. One way to ensure that transitions between different sectors are 
possible is to demand that the theory admits a boundary condition, which 
can be interpreted as a transition to
the trivial sector. This idea is known as the Cobordism Conjecture, 
which states that a bordism group of deformation classes of 
d-dimensional manifolds with a structure imposed by the quantum gravity 
theory is trivial. Nontriviality of bordism groups implies there is a 
symmetry that should be broken predicting the existence of new defects 
that are part of the dynamical objects of the UV complete theory. In 
this talk we will propose a way of extracting properties of these 
defects. Employing modern techniques of geometrically engineering 
SymTFT, which is a particular topological field theory that captures 
symmetries as well as "discrete" operations on qft,  one can predict 
part of the symmetries and local degrees of freedom on the bordism 
defect uncovering part of their properties, which can further be used in 
order to infer the fundamental realization in the UV complete theory. We 
will explain a general picture and give a few simple examples.
The talk is based on the work in progress with Markus Dierigl and 
Ignacio Ruiz.

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Time: October 16, 2026 11:00 Belgrade

Institute of Physics Belgrade, lecture hall 360, 2nd floor

BigBlueButton platform link: 
https://gravityserver.ipb.ac.rs/b/mar-ae0-f4q-qww

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Best regards,
Igor Prlina