Research interests

The research interests of Valentina Prilepina lie at the heart of quantum field theory (QFT), in the conformal field theory (CFT) approach to exploring the vast space of theories. She seeks to shed light on strongly-coupled QFTs by exploiting the conformal bootstrap approach to CFT. Broadly, she desires to contribute to the development of efficient general nonperturbative techniques for solving such theories, with a particular emphasis on CFTs and their applications. She is also interested in probing aspects of holography, string theory, and black hole physics from the perspective of AdS/CFT duality.

Her research spans a broad spectrum of topics in CFT. Through her work, she shed light on the problem of the enhancement of scale to conformal invariance in 4D by excluding a critical loophole, addressed the use of energy positivity conditions to constrain operator product expansion (OPE) coefficients in CFTs, probed the relation between Weyl and conformal invariance in QFT in arbitrary spacetime dimensions, helped establish a universal method for computing general four-point conformal blocks, constructed some of the first recursion relations for five-point conformal blocks, formulated Feynman-like rules for the efficient determination of arbitrary four-point blocks, analyzed conformal conserved currents in the context of the embedding space OPE formalism, and helped construct general index-free projection operators from the point of view of the tensor product decomposition. In addition, she contributed some interesting work in dark matter phenomenology, which straddles the interface of dark matter physics and cosmology.

Overall, she hopes to contribute to the understanding of the structure of the ultimate theoretical landscape. To this end, she intends to pursue a conglomerate approach that draws inspiration from multiple sources, such as the bootstrap, truncation methods, and gauge/gravity duality, which collectively offer a unique theoretical laboratory for this enterprise.