Future Challenges in Holography and Quantum Gravity

28 Sept 2026, 09:00 → 29 Sept 2026, 18:30 Europe/Zurich

4/3-006 - TH Conference Room (CERN)

Alba Grassi (CERN and Université de Genève), Alexandre Belin (Universita & INFN, Milano-Bicocca (IT)), Kyriakos Papadodimas (CERN), Monica Maria Guica (CERN)

Scope of the workshop

Holography has witnessed profounds insights in the past years: the non-perturbative physics of black hole microstates is encoded geometrically in wormholes, understanding finite N holography has revealed a rich erratic behaviour on the N-dependence and subtleties in taking the large N limit, and the holographic bootstrap can now sharply bound the space of gravitational EFTs that can be consistently UV completed, to only mention a few. This workshop aims at gathering a set of worldwide experts on holography and assessing the recent progress on quantum gravity, and paving the way for the years to come.

Monday 28 September

09:30 → 10:30 How to engineer a holographic CFT

Speaker: Alejandra Castro

10:30 → 11:00 coffee break

11:00 → 12:00 Alex Belin is a great guy

Speaker: Eric Perlmutter

12:00 → 13:00 Energy Correlators in CFTs

Speaker: Matthew Walters (Heriot-Watt University)

13:00 → 14:15 Lunch

14:15 → 15:15 Open dS Holography

Speaker: Diego Hofman (University of Amsterdam)

15:15 → 16:15 Timelike Liouville theory and AdS3 gravity at finite cutoff

Speaker: Edgar Shaghoulian (University of California, Santa Cruz)

16:15 → 16:30 coffee break

16:30 → 17:30 The fate of 1/4-BPS states in the D1D5 CFT

Speaker: Suzanne Bintanja (University of California, Los Angeles)

17:30 → 18:30 Spontaneous symmetry breaking and Goldstone modes for information propagation in deep learning

Speaker: Nabil Iqbal (Durham University)

Tuesday 29 September

09:30 → 10:30 Fortuity in ABJM

Speaker: Alberto Zaffaroni (Universita' di Milano-Bicocca)

10:30 → 11:00 coffee break

11:00 → 12:00 de Sitter vacua and pUniverses

Speaker: Tarek Anous (Queen Mary University of London)

12:00 → 13:00 Gravitational dynamics in the presence of finite boundaries

Speaker: Damian Galante (King's college London)

13:00 → 14:15 Lunch

14:15 → 15:15 Observation of gravity-like signatures in holographic codes on a quantum computer

Speaker: Grant Salton

15:15 → 16:15 Tensor models for SU(2) Chern-Simons

The representation theory of 2d CFTs is naturally linked to 3D topological quantum field theories. This connection makes it natural to ask whether tensor integrals constructed from approximate CFT data have a three-dimensional interpretation. In this talk, I will construct a convergent, finite-dimensional tensor integral using the crossing equations of the diagonal SU(2) Wess–Zumino–Witten model. The integration variables are OPE coefficients, and the potential measures the extent to which they violate crossing symmetry. I will then show that the perturbative expansion of this tensor integral is organised as a sum over 3D topologies, weighted by their corresponding Turaev–Viro invariants. This talk is based on ongoing work with Pietro Pelliconi and Aleksandr Zhabin.

Speaker: Diego Liska (EPFL, Lausanne)

16:15 → 16:30 coffee break

16:30 → 17:30 Cardy Random Matrices

Speaker: Julian Sonner (Universite de Geneve (CH))

17:30 → 18:30 talk by De Boer

Speaker: Jan De Boer (University of Amsterdam)