These days I am trying to improve my understanding of quantum field theory with as little perturbation theory as possible. I came across videos from a workshop at IHES in Bures-sur-Yvette on Hamiltonian methods for QFT and videos from a semester at the Newton institute in Cambridge, which both happened about a year ago. Both events are quite well filmed (especially at IHES), most presentations are made on a blackboard, and most talks I checked were well explained and interesting so I definitely recommend them.

The workshop at IHES could have been called 50 shades of , since many talks try to find the critical point of the theory with more or less elaborate methods (8 loop perturbation theory, and various non-perturbative Hamiltonian methods). I recommend in particular the talk of Joan Elias Miro on renormalized Hamiltonian truncation methods, which I found very clear and interesting. There are also nice tensor network talks by the usual suspects (Mari Carmen Banuls, Frank Pollman, Guifre Vidal, Karen Van Acoleyen, Philippe Corboz). Finally there is an intriguing talk by Giuseppe Mussardo on the sinh-Gordon model.

The semester at the Newton Institute was clearly geared more towards mathematics, with important emphasis on modern probabilistic approaches, starting from the stochastic quantization of Euclidean field theories. The semester opens with 4 really amazing lectures by Antti Kupiainen on the renormalization group (supplemented by lecture notes). He works with Euclidean in all dimensions, on the lattice and in the continuum limit, and explains everything that can happen. He distinguishes very well the IR scaling limit and UV continuum limit problems, the various fixed point structures, the easy and hard problems, many issues which had always been quite confused in my mind. It’s a pleasure to listen to people who understand what they are doing. There is another talk, more like a work in progress, where Martin Hairer attempts the stochastic quantization of Yang-Mills (which starts from a quite original explanation of what a gauge theory is!). I have not had much time to check the other talks, but the whole program looks really interesting (with a lot of different ways to define rigorously ). I watch these while ironing my shirts, so I will know more at the next laundry.