11:30 Refreshments (tea, coffee and homemade biscuits)

12:00 Talks (main room)

13:15 Buffet Style Lunch (incl. tea, coffee and homemade cakes)

15:00 End

Conformal defects can be characterised by their contributions to the Weyl anomaly. The coefficients of these terms, often called defect central charges, depend on the particular defect insertion in a given conformal field theory. I will review what is currently known about defect central charges across dimensions, and present novel results. I will discuss many examples where they can be computed exactly without requiring any approximations or limits. Particular emphasis will be placed on recently developed tools for superconformal defects as well as defects in free theories.

Hydrodynamic excitations corresponding to sound and shear modes in fluids are characterized by gapless dispersion relations. In the hydrodynamic gradient expansion, their frequencies are represented by power series in spatial momenta. In this talk we will discuss the convergence properties of the hydrodynamic series by studying the associated spectral curve in the space of complexified frequency and complexified spatial momentum. For the N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills plasma at infinite 't Hooft coupling, we will use the holographic methods to demonstrate that the derivative expansions have finite non-zero radii of convergence. Obstruction to the convergence of hydrodynamic series arises from level-crossings in the quasinormal spectrum at complex momenta. We will discuss how finiteness of 't Hooft coupling affects the radius of convergence. We will show that the purely perturbative calculation in terms of inverse 't Hooft coupling gives the increasing radius of convergence when the coupling is decreasing. Applying the non-perturbative resummation techniques will make radius of convergence piecewise continuous function that decreases after the initial increase. Finally, we will provide arguments in favour of the non-perturbative approach and show that the presence of nonperturbative modes in the quasinormal spectrum can be indirectly inferred from the analysis of perturbative critical points.

I will describe recent work with Zhibeodov on the boundary interpretation of orbits around an AdS black hole. When the orbits are far away from the black hole, these orbits describe heavy-light double-twist operators on the boundary. I will discuss how the dimensions of these operators can be computed exactly in terms of quasinormal modes in the bulk, using techniques from a paper to appear soon with Grassi, Iossa, Lichtig, and Zhiboedov. Then I will explain how these results are related to the concept of quantum scars, which are eigenstates that do not obey ETH.