David Simmons-Duffin

I am a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech. My research focuses on strongly-coupled quantum field theories, with a particular interest in conformal field theories and their applications to particle physics, condensed matter physics, and quantum gravity. I am part of the the Simons Collaboration on the Nonperturbative Bootstrap. Here is my CV.

Publications

• Publications list at inspirehep.net

Teaching

• Starting in 2020, most of my course websites are on Canvas, and not publicly available.
• 2019-2020: Ph 121ab: Computational Physics Lab
• 2019: Ph 12c: Statistical Mechanics
• 2018-2019: Ph 121ab: Computational Physics Lab
• 2017-2018: Ph 229ab: Advanced Mathematical Methods: Conformal Field Theory

Lecture Notes

• TASI Lectures on the Conformal Bootstrap. Lectures from TASI 2015 and the Advanced Strings School 2015.
• Conformal Field Theory. Course notes for Ph 229ab 2017 at Caltech. An expanded/extended version of the TASI notes above.
• Statistical Mechanics. Course notes for Ph 12c 2020 at Caltech.
• TASI Lectures on Conformal Field Theory in Lorentzian Signature. Lectures from TASI 2019.
• Dispersive Functionals. Lectures from Bootstrap 2022.
• Effective Field Theory and the Standard Model. Course notes for Ph 230a 2022 at Caltech.
• TASI Lectures on CFT and Observables on a Null Plane. Lectures from TASI 2023.

Software

• SDPB: A Semidefinite Program Solver for the Conformal Bootstrap
• Software repository for the Bootstrap Collaboration
• Hyperion: a Haskell framework for concurrent computations on an HPC cluster.
• Gitlab profile. Contains most of my public research software not linked above.

Miscellaneous

• Honda Needs a Tune-Up
• Tom Scott: Why California's Musical Road Sounds Terrible
• The snarXiv
• arXiv vs. snarXiv
• 3d Ising Zoom
• Quanta Magazine on the conformal bootstrap
• New Scientist on the conformal bootstrap [pdf]
• Quanta Magazine on the Ising model