Instituto de Física Teórica

Doctoral Course: 'AdS/CFT Holography as a Framework for Quantum Gravity’
2026-03-09 10:00 - 2026-03-12 12:00 (Europe/Madrid) | Blue Room, Instituto de Física Teórica (IFT) - C. Nicolás Cabrera, 13-15, Fuencarral-El Pardo, Madrid, 28049,, Spain
Doctoral Course: ‘AdS/CFT Holography as a Framework for Quantum Gravity’

Lecturer: José Calderón-Infante
(Caltech)

Dates:
📅9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 17, 18 March 2026
🕒 10:00-12:00

Location:
📍Sala Azul, Instituto de Física Teórica (IFT)

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87999278090?pwd=[REDACTED]

Course Overview
This course provides an introduction toAdS/CFT holography, with a particular focus on its role as aframework for quantum gravity in asymptotically Anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetimes.
We will begin by motivating the idea of holography in quantum gravity, reviewing the geometry and physics of AdS, and introducing some basics of conformal field theory (CFT). The course will then move to a more top-down perspective: after presenting the required ingredients of string theory, we will discuss Maldacena’s decoupling argument and the AdS/CFT correspondence it leads to, learning the AdS/CFT dictionary along the way.
The final part of the course will focus on AdS/CFT as a quantum gravity framework, covering topics such as:

Holographic CFTs

Black hole entropy in AdS/CFT

Basics of bulk reconstruction and its relation to the absence of global symmetries in quantum gravity

The Swampland Distance Conjecture in AdS/CFT

Prerequisites:
The course only requires basic knowledge of differential geometry and quantum field theory. While some elements of string theory will appear, all necessary ingredients will be introduced during the lectures.
