Summer Program

Bootstrap, Holography & Swampland: Imprint of UV principles on IR physics

May 25–June 15, 2025

Organizers:

Miguel Montero, Instituto de Fisica Teorica
*Julio Parra-Martinez, Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques
Leonardo Rastelli, Stony Brook University
Irene Valenzuela, CERN

*represents the organizer in charge of promoting diversity

Over the last few years, a large body of evidence has accrued, both in  field theory and in quantum gravity, suggesting that very high-energy (UV) physics can have an unexpected impact at low energies. Causality and unitarity can bound the sign and size of low-energy EFT couplings;  consistency conditions can place strong bounds on Conformal Field Theory (CFT) data; exploration of the string theory landscape and a variety of gedanken experiments (the Swampland program) suggest the existence of universal consistency conditions that must be satisfied by the low-energy Effective Field Theory (EFT); and holography in its various forms shows that  quantum-mechanical models can be used to provide a UV-complete reconstruction of an emergent spacetime. A central physical question that all these approaches try to answer is what are the consistent low-energy modifications of Einstein gravity. A narrower question is whether string theory is the unique perturbative completion of Einstein gravity. The aim of this  ACP Summer program is to bring together researchers from different backgrounds who currently investigate UV implications at low energies in quantum field theory and gravity, emphasizing the complementarity and existing synergies between the different approaches.

Summer Workshops

The summer program, running for 16 weeks from late-May to mid-September, emphasizes exciting open problems at the cutting edge. Two or three concurrent workshops, each with a specific focus selected for timeliness and the potential for breakthroughs and of two to five weeks in length, establish the main themes of each week, with twelve or thirteen different workshops each summer, balanced across fields including particle physics, string theory, astrophysics and hard and soft condensed matter physics, as well as emerging areas including biological physics, ultra-cold atom physics, quantum information, and physical mathematics. Additional researchers participate in small working groups or as individual researchers. This framework is designed to maximize informal interactions and free discussion within each area and to promote cross-fertilization between different areas via the common language of theoretical physics. Participation in the summer program of the Aspen Center for Physics is by application and subsequent invitation only. View past workshops.