Workshop


18 May, 2026 - 19 Jun, 2026

Defects and Extended Excitations in Quantum Field Theory, Quantum Matter and Statistical Models

Abstract

All known quantum and statistical systems support defects and extended excitations, which are both described by extended operators in quantum field theory. Examples are Wilson loops and their higher-dimensional generalizations. Extended excitations are instrumental in characterizing the phases and dynamics of physical systems: for example, Wilson lines in the confinement-deconfinement transition, and boundaries/interfaces in topological phases of matter. They also implement generalized symmetries, whose recent paradigm-shifting discovery has already found many applications, ranging from condensed matter systems to statistical models and four-dimensional gauge theories.

Defects are physically interesting observables in many contexts. For instance, defects describe boundaries and impurities in materials at criticality (modeled by Wilson and 't Hooft lines of heavy probe particles). Furthermore, many information-theoretic quantities map directly to defect observables, such as in the calculation of entanglement entropy and in the description of measurement protocols.

The growing interest in defects and extended excitations, their generalized symmetries, inner dynamics, and diverse applications is evidenced by a large number of recent works. Several research groups, in high-energy, condensed matter, and statistical physics, each employing distinct methods and terminologies, share common interests in these topics. The goal of this GGI activity is to bring together theoretical physicists working on extended operators in different domains, to foster cross-disciplinary collaborations.

Topics

- generalized symmetries and higher categorical structures
- defect dynamics
- phases of gauge theories
- defects on the lattice and exact results
- defects and quantum information

Organizers

Andrea Cappelli (INFN Firenze),
Gabriel Cuomo (SISSA),
Zohar Komargodski (Stony Brook Univ),
Max Metlitski (MIT),
Adam Nahum (ENS Paris),
Hubert Saleur (IPhT Saclay),
Sakura Schafer-Nameki (Oxford Univ)

Local organizers

Andrea Cappelli, Gabriel Cuomo

Contact

andrea.cappelli@fi.infn.it

Website:

Related events
Poster session

The participants who would like to present a poster are kindly invited to send an email with the title and a short abstract to alice.bernamonti@unifuit before May 22, specifying for which week of the workshop. Since a limited number of panels is available, the organizers will select the posters shortly after the deadline.

week 3

Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday
11:30 - 12:30 Tomasevic Newenfeld Collin-Ellerin Caceres
13:00 - 14:30 lunch lunch lunch lunch lunch
14:30 - 15:30 Sorce Emparan
  • Elena Caceres: 'On Sparse SYK, wormholes, and chaos"
  • Sean Colin-Ellerin: "Bootstrapping wuantum extremal surfaces
  • Roberto Emparan: "Black tsunamis and naked singularities in AdS'
  • Dominik Neuenfeld: "Bounds on gravitational brane couplings and tomography in AdS3 black hole microstates"
  • Jonathan Sorce: "Bulk causality from boundary entanglement: the connected wedge theorem revisited"
  • Marija Tomasevic: 'ds through holography

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Talks
Date Speaker Title Type Useful Links
18 May, 2026 - 14:30-15:30 Lorenzo Bianchi Analytic bootstrap for holographic surface defect Talk
18 May, 2026 - 15:30-16:30 Philine Van Vliet Sum rules for conformal defect data Talk
19 May, 2026 - 11:00-12:00 Ryan Lanzetta Unitarity bounds on cusp anomalous dimension Talk
19 May, 2026 - 12:00-13:00 Christian Copetti When symmetries twist: anomaly inflow on monodromy defects Talk
19 May, 2026 - 14:30-14:45 Jeremias Aguilera-Damia Confining flux tubes in a gapless phase (part 1) Talk
19 May, 2026 - 14:45-15:00 Giovanni Rizi Confining flux tubes in a gapless phase (part 2) Talk
19 May, 2026 - 15:30-15:45 Raquel Izquierdo Garcia Higher Dimensional Holography Talk
19 May, 2026 - 15:45-16:00 Riccardo Villa Gauging in superconductors and other electronic systems Talk
19 May, 2026 - 16:00-16:15 Stathis Vitouladitis The state/defect correspondence Talk
20 May, 2026 - 11:00-13:00 Masaki Oshikawa Review talk Talk
21 May, 2026 - 11:00-12:00 Pavel Putrov TQFT from the ground state Talk
21 May, 2026 - 12:00-13:00 Ingo Runkel Extensions of topological symmetries Talk
22 May, 2026 - 11:00-12:00 Riccardo Argurio Defects, flat gauging, T-duality: at any radius, in the continuum and on the lattice. Talk
22 May, 2026 - 12:00-13:00 Hidenori Fukaya Curved defects and induced gravity Talk
25 May, 2026 - 11:00-12:00 Shu-Heng Shao Lattice chiral symmetry from bosons in 3+1d Talk
25 May, 2026 - 12:00-13:00 Paul Fendley Exact CFT results from the lattice Talk
26 May, 2026 - 11:00-12:00 Fei Yan Integrability and topological defects in (1+1)-d quantum spin chains Talk
26 May, 2026 - 12:00-13:00 Michele Del Zotto TQFT from the groundstate (continued) Talk
26 May, 2026 - 14:30-14:50 Andrea Antinucci Field theories for (non-Abelian) anyon condensation transitions Talk
26 May, 2026 - 14:50-15:10 Federico Ambrosino Charge conjugation symmetry and Monodromy defects in Chern-Simons theory Talk
26 May, 2026 - 15:10-15:30 Rodrigo Arouca Hall Conductance in a weakly time-reversal invariant open system Talk
26 May, 2026 - 15:50-16:10 Giovanni Galati Scattering off defects, and transmitting what I have understood. Talk
26 May, 2026 - 16:10-16:30 Han Ma Z2 gauge structure in the generalized Kitaev honeycomb models Talk
27 May, 2026 - 11:00-12:00 Frank Verstraete Perfect Particle Transmission through Duality Defects Talk
27 May, 2026 - 12:00-13:00 Po-Shen Hsin Explore entropic orders in quantum lattice models Talk
28 May, 2026 - 11:00-12:00 Xiao-Gang Wen Statistics for Elementary Excitations of Mixed Dimensionalities Talk
28 May, 2026 - 12:00-13:00 Lukas Fidkowski Chiral Lattice gauge theories from symmetry disentanglers Talk
29 May, 2026 - 11:00-12:00 Yifan Wang Extraordinary Surface Criticalities for Interacting Fermions Talk
29 May, 2026 - 12:00-13:00 Luisa Eck Non-invertible symmetry enriched topological orders Talk
01 Jun, 2026 - 11:00-13:00 Yin-Chen He Fuzzy sphere for conformal defects Talk
03 Jun, 2026 - 11:00-13:00 Sakura Schafer-Nameki Pedagogical Introduction to the SymTFT and Applications Talk
03 Jun, 2026 - 14:30-14:50 Lea Bottini Topological order enriched by non-invertible symmetry via anyon condensation Talk
03 Jun, 2026 - 14:50-15:10 Nayan Myerson-Jain Rényi defect criticality and entropy in (2+1)d QCPs Talk
03 Jun, 2026 - 15:40-16:00 Pierluigi Niro From QED_3 to the multicritical point of the Fradkin-Shenker model Talk
03 Jun, 2026 - 16:00-16:20 Abhinav Prem Intrinsically Mixed-State Topological Order Talk
04 Jun, 2026 - 11:00-12:00 Ryohei Kobayashi Automorphism in gauge theory and Clifford-hierarchy stabilizer codes Talk
04 Jun, 2026 - 12:00-13:00 Hubert Saleur O(3) sigma model, XXX spin chains and t’Hooft anomalies Talk
05 Jun, 2026 - 11:00-12:00 Ilya Gruzberg Multifractals at Anderson transitions and the Coulomb gas: a (b)CFT perspective Talk
08 Jun, 2026 - 11:00-12:00 Cenke Xu Symmetry origin of the quantum-classical transition, hydrodynamics, and decodability. Talk
08 Jun, 2026 - 12:00-13:00 Yunqin Zheng On the absence of symmetric conformal boundary conditions Talk
09 Jun, 2026 - 11:00-12:00 Anton Kapustin Higher symmetries and homotopy theory in quantum lattice models Talk
09 Jun, 2026 - 12:00-13:00 Sergej Moroz Spontaneously Broken Non-Invertible Symmetries in Transverse-Field Ising Qudit Chains Talk
09 Jun, 2026 - 14:30-14:45 Giuseppe Policastro Holographic generalized conformal junctions Talk
09 Jun, 2026 - 14:45-15:00 Arkya Chatterjee More (about) non-invertible symmetries in the 4-state Potts model Talk
09 Jun, 2026 - 15:00-15:15 Apoorv Tiwari Universal quantum computation with group surface codes Talk
09 Jun, 2026 - 15:45-16:00 Anatoly Konechny RG flows of chiral defects from fusing relations Talk
09 Jun, 2026 - 16:00-16:15 Luigi Tizzano Soft Theorems and Null Cusps from Line Defects Talk
09 Jun, 2026 - 16:15-16:30 Rajath Radhakrishnan Dimensional reduction of topological operators Talk
10 Jun, 2026 - 11:00-13:00 Nat Tantivasadakarn Symmetries on the lattice Talk
11 Jun, 2026 - 11:00-12:00 Sara Murciano Measurement-altered criticality beyond forced outcomes Talk
11 Jun, 2026 - 12:00-13:00 Ibrahima Bah Aspects of locality, unitarity, and symmetries Talk
12 Jun, 2026 - 11:00-12:00 Xinping Yang Microscopic structure of categorical duality operators Talk
12 Jun, 2026 - 12:00-13:00 Salvatore Pace Comments on Clifford QCA symmetries Talk
15 Jun, 2026 - 11:00-12:00 Charlotte Kristjansen Black Holes and Integrable Boundary States in Quantum Spin Chains Talk
15 Jun, 2026 - 12:00-13:00 Fabio Apruzzi Holographic Defects: From Strings to Punctures Talk
16 Jun, 2026 - 11:00-12:00 Chris Herzog Scattering Off Chamblin-Reall Branes Talk
16 Jun, 2026 - 12:00-13:00 Francesco Parisen Toldin Extraordinary transition at the edge of a correlated topological insulator Talk
16 Jun, 2026 - 14:30-14:50 Bernardo Zan Quantum group symmetry and non-local operators Talk
16 Jun, 2026 - 14:50-15:10 Alison Warman Twin Phases: Phase Transitions Without Hidden Symmetry Breaking Talk
16 Jun, 2026 - 15:10-15:30 Giuseppe Di Giulio Local Quench from a Krylov Perspective Talk
16 Jun, 2026 - 15:30-15:50 Francesco Galvagno Exact results for bulk integrated correlators with line defects Talk
16 Jun, 2026 - 15:50-16:10 Matthew Roberts Magnetic defects and new RG monotones Talk
16 Jun, 2026 - 16:10-16:30 Zimo Sun Extraordinary Surface Criticalities for Interacting Fermions II Talk
17 Jun, 2026 - 11:00-12:00 Francesco Benini Quantum-information methods to quantify symmetry breaking Talk
17 Jun, 2026 - 12:00-13:00 Inaki Garcia-Etxebarria Anomaly-induced vanishing of brane partition functions Talk
18 Jun, 2026 - 11:00-12:00 Marco Meineri Defects and protected operators at the boundary of AdS Talk
18 Jun, 2026 - 12:00-13:00 Alessandro Vichi How (not) to confine color: a bootstrap study of Yang Mills in AdS Talk
19 Jun, 2026 - 11:00-12:00 Fiona Burnell Field theories for subsystem-symmetry protected topological orders Talk
19 Jun, 2026 - 12:00-13:00 Erik Tonni Entanglement Hamiltonians in the presence of a boundary Talk
Materials