Iberian Strings 2026

21 Jan 2026, 08:30 → 23 Jan 2026, 19:00 Europe/Madrid

Santiago de Compostela, Spain

Iberian Strings 2026 is the eighteenth edition of the annual meeting of the Spanish and Portuguese communities working on String Theory. 

Recent developments in supergravity, strings, branes, gauge theories and related topics will be discussed.

Registrations are closed.

---

Together with contributed talks and a poster session, there will be lectures by six invited speakers:

• Dionysios Anninos (King's College London)

• Vijay Balasubramanian (Univ. Pennsylvania)

• Pablo Cano (Univ. Murcia)

• Shira Chapman (Ben Gurion Univ.)

• Shota Komatsu (CERN)

• Sakura Schafer-Nameki (Univ. Oxford)

---

Scientific Committee

• Igor Bandos (IKERBASQUE and Univ. Basque Country)
• Miguel Costa (Univ. Porto)
• Roberto Emparan (ICREA and Univ. Barcelona)
• Jose J. Fernández-Melgarejo (Univ. Murcia)
• Rafael Hernández (Univ. Complutense, Madrid)
• Bert Janssen (Univ. Granada)
• María Lledó (Univ. Valencia)
• Gabriel Lopes Cardoso (Univ. Lisbon)
• Yolanda Lozano (Univ. Oviedo)
• Fernando Marchesano (IFT, Madrid)
• Javier Mas (IGFAE and Univ. Santiago de Compostela)
• David Mateos (ICREA and Univ. Barcelona)
• Javier Molina-Vilaplana (Univ. Politécnica, Cartagena)
• Tomás Ortín (IFT, Madrid)
• Miguel Ángel Vázquez-Mozo (Univ. Salamanca)

---

Local organising committee (IGFAE and Univ. Santiago de Compostela)

• Felipe E. Agurto Sepulveda
• Riccardo Borsato 
• José Edelstein
• Miguel García Fernández
• Tim Meier
• Marcelo Oyarzo
• Konstantinos Rigatos

---

   

 

Wednesday 21 January

08:30 → 09:00 Opening

09:00 → 10:00 Counting states in quantum gravity

Speaker: Vijay Balasubramanian (University of Pennsilvania)

10:00 → 10:30 A new String Field Theory

Speaker: Chris M Hull (Imperial College)

10:30 → 11:00 Coffee break

11:00 → 11:30 Integrability for non-AdS holography

Speaker: Sibylle Driezen

11:30 → 12:00 Exact BPS black hole microstate counting from holographic conformal quantum mechanics

Speaker: Gabriel Cardoso (Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa)

12:00 → 12:30 Unveiling horizons in quantum critical collapse

Speaker: Marija Tomasevic (CERN)

12:30 → 12:45 Non-invertible symmetries of Non-Linear Sigma Models

Speaker: Guillermo Arias-Tamargo (Imperial College London)

12:45 → 13:00 Floquet SYK wormholes

Speaker: Martí Berenguer Mimó (IGFAE, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela)

13:00 → 14:45 Lunch

14:45 → 15:45 Probing new physics with black hole ringdown

Speaker: Pablo A. Cano (Universidad de Murcia)

15:45 → 16:15 Accelerating black holes in higher-derivative theories of gravity

Speaker: Marina David (KU Leuven)

16:15 → 16:30 Entanglement asymmetry and Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking

Speaker: Eduardo Garcia-Valdecasas (SISSA)

16:30 → 17:00 Coffee break

17:00 → 18:30 Gong Show

Conveners: Alessandro Pini (Humboldt University), Alexandre Serantes Rubianes (Ghent University), Andrea Conti (Universidad de Oviedo), Bruno Fernandes (Universidade do Porto), Colin Sterckx (Université Libre de Bruxelles), Emilie Despontin (Université Libre de Bruxelles), Guim Planella Planas (Utrecht University), Javier Moreno (Universitat de Barcelona), Lucía Castells (University of Barcelona), Ricardo Stuardo (Universidad de Oviedo), Verónica Collazuol (IFT, CSIC/Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)

17:07 Emergent strings from Quantum Field Theory

Speaker: Guim Planella Planas (Utrecht University)

18:45 → 20:45 Reception

Thursday 22 January

09:00 → 10:00 Quantum complexity: from black holes to quantum circuits and chaos

Speaker: Shira Chapman (Ben Gurion University)

10:00 → 10:30 Far-from equilibrium inflation

Speaker: Jorge Casalderrey (Universitat de Barcelona)

10:30 → 11:00 Coffee break & Group photo

11:00 → 11:30 The Hilbert space of gauge theories: group averaging and the quantization of Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity

Speaker: Elba Alonso-Monsalve (MIT)

11:30 → 12:00 Closed universes in holography

Speaker: Alejandro Vilar López (University of British Columbia)

12:00 → 12:30 BKL dynamics inside higher-dimensional AdS black holes

Speaker: Ángel Murcia (Universitat de Barcelona)

12:30 → 12:45 Remarks on Quadratic Gravity

Speaker: Luca Buoninfante (IGFAE, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela)

12:45 → 13:00 The Green-Schwarz mechanism and its non-relativistic limit

Speaker: Eric Lescano (Wroclaw University)

13:00 → 14:45 Lunch

14:45 → 15:15 Universal sectors in 2d near-extremal QFTs

Speaker: Stephane Detournay (Université Libre de Bruxelles)

15:15 → 15:45 Microscopic description of critical bubbles from holography

Speaker: Javier Subils (Utrecht University)

15:45 → 16:15 Chaos and complexity on the (non-)planar worldsheet

Speaker: Saskia Demulder (CUNEF Universidad)

16:15 → 16:30 The black hole-tower correspondence

Speaker: Alvaro Herraez (Max Planck Institute for Physics)

16:30 → 17:00 Coffee break

17:00 → 17:30 Connecting boundary entropy and effective central charge at interfaces

Speaker: Carlos Hoyos (Universidad de Oviedo)

17:30 → 18:00 Holographic QFT dynamics on curved spacetimes

Speaker: Francesco Nitti (APC Paris)

20:30 → 23:30 Banquet

Friday 23 January

09:00 → 10:00 Quantum features of a Λ>0 universe

Speaker: Dionysios Anninos (King's College London)

10:00 → 10:30 No shift, Sherlock

Speaker: José Calderón Infante (Caltech)

10:30 → 11:00 Coffee break

11:00 → 11:30 New developments in 5d gauge theories

Speaker: Amihay Hanany (Imperial College)

11:30 → 12:00 On deformations of AdS3 solutions: G-structures and supersymmetric probe branes

Speaker: Anayeli Ramirez (KU Leuven)

12:00 → 12:30 Higher-form symmetries in supergravity

Speaker: Tomas Ortin (IFT, CSIC/Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)

12:30 → 12:45 Worldsheet theory of 2d QCD

Speaker: Adi Armoni (Swansea University)

12:45 → 13:00 Quantum transparency of near-extremal black holes

Speaker: Stefano Trezzi (Institute of Cosmos Sciences, University of Barcelona (ICCUB))

13:00 → 14:45 Lunch

14:45 → 15:45 Matrix models and holography

Speaker: Shota Komatsu (CERN)

15:45 → 16:15 Holographic shear correlators at low temperatures, and quantum η/s

Speaker: Elias Kiritsis (University of Crete)