3–14 Aug 2026
Europe/London timezone
This is the annual bootstrap conference, which will take place in London during the first two weeks of August 2026

Dynamics of Heavy Operators and Holography

4 Aug 2026, 11:15
45m
Oliver Thompson Lecture Theatre 101 (Tait Building at City St George’s, University of London)

Oliver Thompson Lecture Theatre 101

Tait Building at City St George’s, University of London

Speaker

Francesco Aprile

Description

I will describe the computation of a class of Heavy-Heavy-Light-Light (HHLL) correlators in which the heavy operator is a coherent state built from multi-graviton states. In N=4 SYM, this problem can be approached from several complementary perspectives, connecting gravity, string theory, and beautiful mathematics. Perturbatively, the leading-order contribution to the HHLL correlator is computed explicitly by combining a bootstrap approach based on the consistency of the OPE in the dual CFT with a gravity approach that maps the problem of determining the Green's function of the dilaton field in the heavy background to the connection problem for a Heun equation. Non-perturbatively, an integrated version of the HHLL correlator is computed exactly as a function of the relevant parameters using supersymmetric localization and modular resurgence analysis. Taken together, these results provide non-trivial predictions for the string theory dual and I will discuss how this information is encoded holographically.

Presentation materials