Conformal anomalies: theory and applications 2026

17 juin 2026, 08:00 → 19 juin 2026, 18:15 Europe/Paris

Seminar room 0150, building L, ground floor (Tours)

Maxim Chernodub (CNRS, Université de Tours, France), Andrea Palermo (Institut Denis Poisson), Laetitia Portier (Institut Denis Poisson), Sergey Solodukhin ( Institut Denis Poisson), Elizabeth Winstanley (University of Sheffield)

This workshop will bring together leading experts from around the world to discuss the latest advances in our understanding of conformal symmetries and their anomalies, covering a wide range of topics related to conformal systems, including:

• Correlation functions
• Boundaries
• Applications in black holes
• Cosmology
• Strongly coupled systems
• Condensed matter systems
   

This event is a follow-up to the workshops on conformal anomalies held in Tours in 2022 and 2024.

There is no conference fee.

mer. 17 juin

09:45 → 10:15 Registration/Coffee

10:15 → 11:00 Tension of holographic branes

Orateur: Prof. Costas Bachas

11:00 → 11:45 Conformal defects, holography and the bootstrap

Orateur: Valentina Forini

12:00 → 14:00 Lunch

14:00 → 14:45 Radiation from conformal anomalies

Orateur: Bartomeu Fiol

14:45 → 15:30 The a-function in fractional dimensions

Orateur: Ian Jack

Talk_Ian_Jack_Tours_Conformal_Anomalies_June_2026.pdf

15:30 → 16:00 Coffee break

16:00 → 16:45 Gradient properties of the RG: from A-functions to Zamolodchikov's metrics

On the one hand the analysis of the topological A-anomaly suggests that the renormalization group flow has a gradient structure for models with short-range interactions in even dimensions. On the other hand the requirement that the flow has a gradient structure constrains form of the beta functions. We show that these properties survive nontrivially also in other dimensions and in presence of long-range interactions. We also explicitly connect the gradient structure with the F-function and a generalization of Zamolodchikov's metric using general self-interacting scalar theories with many flavors as examples.

Orateur: Omar Zanusso

16:45 → 17:30 Heun functions from Virasoro conformal blocks

Orateur: Oleg Lisovyy

17:30 → 17:50 Conformal transformations and strong-gravity effects

The presence of strong, background fields can induce instabilities in a quantum field theory, with important implications, for example, in the description of the early universe. Whether these background fields are electromagnetic or gravitational, understanding their effects requires the development and use of nonperturbative techniques. Recent results in this direction, employing conformal transformations of the metric, resummed effective actions and heat kernels, will be presented. Based on arxiv.org/2602.18578.

Orateur: Sebastián Franchino-Viñas

17:50 → 18:10 Anomalous transport from effective field theory

Orateur: Rémy Larue

18:10 → 18:30 Derivation of the Path Integral for Quantum Mechanics on SU(2)

Orateur: Mathieu Beauvillain

18:30 → 19:30 Reception

jeu. 18 juin

09:00 → 09:45 QCD trace anomaly in a nucleon and dense matter

Orateur: Kenji Fukushima

09:45 → 10:15 Coffee break

10:15 → 11:00 Anomalous transport in anomaly free currents from symmetry breaking

Orateur: Karl Landsteiner (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain)

11:00 → 11:45 Axial and mixed axial-gravitational anomalies in rotating systems

Orateur: Matteo Buzzegoli

12:00 → 14:00 Lunch

14:00 → 14:45 Euclidean methods for Lorentzian de Sitter space

Orateur: Dionysios Anninos

14:45 → 15:30 Semi-classical black holes: recent advances and future prospects

Orateur: Antonia Frassino

15:30 → 16:00 Coffee break

16:00 → 16:45 On bulk reconstruction in Lorentzian AdS and its flat space limit

We revisit the reconstruction of a free scalar in 4-dimensional Lorentzian Anti-de-Sitter spacetime in terms of primary operators in the boundary 3d CFT. We show that the positive and negative energy subspaces of solutions to the Klein–Gordon equation in AdS can be spanned with bulk-to-boundary propagators with appropriate time orderings. As a result, free scalar fields on a codimension-1 bulk hypersurface can be expressed in terms of operators integrated over boundary regions in the past or future of the hypersurface with kernels given by time-ordered or anti-time-ordered propagators. We will explain how to obtain a similar decomposition of the free field in terms of boundary operators transforming in representations of an so(3,1) subalgebra of the 4d AdS isometry algebra by constructing the appropriate wavefunctions. We conclude by showing that the expansion of a free scalar in Minkowski space in plane wave, Carrollian and conformal primary bases follow from these results in various flat space limits.

Orateur: Ana-Maria Raclariu

16:45 → 17:30 Gravitational Creation of Conformal Fields from Cosmological Perturbations

Orateur: Azadeh Maleknejad

17:30 → 17:50 Computational Quantum Field Theory: Extension to curved spacetimes

We introduce the computational quantum field theory (CQFT) framework for calculating the time-resolved number densities of particle--antiparticle pairs produced by external electromagnetic backgrounds (Schwinger effect). We then extend this framework to curved two-dimensional spacetimes, where the local conformal flatness of the metric enables a simplified treatment of the fermionic dynamics ensuring unitary time evolution with respect to the flat inner product. Finally, we present results for fermion--antifermion pair production induced by spacetime curvature.

Orateur: Mohammed Alkhateeb

17:50 → 18:10 Matching A with F in long-range QFTs

Orateur: Lorenzo Benfatto

18:10 → 18:30 Hydrodynamics of dilation and spin currents

Orateur: Zhong-Hua Zhang

ven. 19 juin

09:00 → 09:45 Operator product expansion in conformal field theories on curved spaces

Orateur: Anatoly Konechny

09:45 → 10:15 Coffee break

10:15 → 11:00 Quantum information geometry of driven CFTs

Orateur: Esko Keski-Vakkuri

11:00 → 11:45 Conformal anomalies in Carrollian theories

Orateur: Dmitri Vassilevich

12:00 → 14:00 Lunch

14:00 → 14:45 Gibbons-Hawking-York term for metric affine gravity

Orateur: Ioannis Matthaiakakis

14:45 → 15:30 Quantum systems under imaginary rotation

Orateur: Victor E. Ambruș (West University of Timișoara)

15:30 → 16:00 Closing and coffee