  Continuous phase transitions in equilibrium statistical mechanics were
successfully described 50 years ago with the development of the renormalization
group framework. This framework was initially developed in the context of phase
transitions whose universal properties are captured by the long wavelength (and
long time) fluctuations of a Landau order parameter field. Subsequent
developments include a straightforward generalization to a class of $T = 0$
phase transitions driven by quantum fluctuations. In the last 2 decades it has
become clear that there is a vast landscape of quantum phase transitions where
the physics is not always usefully (or sometimes cannot be) formulated in terms
of fluctuations of a Landau order parameter field. A wide class of such phase
transitions - dubbed deconfined quantum critical points - involve the emergence
of fractionalized degrees of freedom coupled to emergent gauge fields. Here I
review some salient aspects of these deconfined critical points.
