Personal Details: Francesco Aprile, born the 27 of October 1984 in Terracina, ITALY (EU citizenship)

I am a theoretical physicist, working in Quantum Field Theory, Conformal Field Theory, Bootstrap Methods, AdS/CFT, and String Theory.

Find my work online: ORCID 0000-0002-4826-3091. My list of publications on INSPIRE: f a Francesco Aprile

Current Position: Tenure-Track Assistant Professor, Complutense University in Madrid. Department of Theoretical Physics. My UCM webpage

Awarded Grants:

• January 2025: High-energy Intelligence, European HORIZON-MSCA, DOI 10.3030/101182937.
• January 2023: Ramon y Cajal Fellowship, Spanish Government, RYC2021-031627-I.

Post-Doc Positions:

• from July 2021 to December 2022: Postdoc at the SAIFR and IFT group, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil.
• from October 2017 to March 2021: Postdoc at University of Milano Bicocca, Italy.
• from October 2015 to September 2017: Postdoc at the STAG group, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Southampton, UK.
• from September 2013 to September 2015: Postdoc at the Crete Center for Theoretical Physics, University of Crete, Greece.

Education:

• 2013, PhD, University of Barcelona, Spain
• 2008, Master in Theoretical Physics, University of Pisa, Italy.
• 2006, Bachelor in Physical Sciences, University of Pisa, Italy.

CV summary:

During my PhD - funded by the Spanish FPU fellowship - I acquired broad expertise on Quantum Field Theories, General Relativity, Supersymmetry, Supergravity, String Theory, and the AdS/CFT correspondence. In 2008-2009, Holographic superconductivity was proposed as a computational playground to understand analog properties of real-life High-Tc superconductors. The idea was to explore the properties of strongly interacting charged matter by considering holographic systems within the same universality class. There were many generalizations of this idea in Condensed Matter Theory and this line of research received the acronym “AdS/CMT”. My PhD thesis, “Applied Gauge/Gravity Duality, from Supergravity to Superconductivity”, and my publications from 2009 to 2014 focussed on this subject. Some of my work at that time became relatively popular: In [1003.4487] I was the first to provide analytic formulae for critical exponents at the onset of holographic superconductivity. In [1104.4473] I was the first to study AdS/CMT models in the phase diagram N=4 SYM by using gauged supergravity. In [1011.2172] I was the first to describe p-wave holographic superconductors. In [1410.7773], I was the first to understand the phenomenon of entanglement fragmentation in holographic theories.

During the 2016-2017, Rastelli and Zhou proposed a novel bootstrap approach to systematically compute tree-level correlators of strongly coupled theories with gravity duals. This was the time of my second post-doc at the University of Southampton. The case of N=4 SYM, which is also a Conformal Field Theory (CFT) was particularly appealing because of its relevance to Quantum Gravity (QG) in AdS. During 2017-2019, and in collaboration with James Drummund and Paul Heslop, we put out a series of seminal papers, which started with [1706.02822] and [1706.08456], where we computed for the first time the full one-loop four-point correlation function of the graviton multiplet in type IIB supergravity compactified on the five-sphere, from the CFT. This computation cannot be done with traditional techniques, and it is only possible by combining the following observations:

• Holographic correlators can be computed by using the Operator Product Expansion (OPE) and the amplitude bootstrap approach.
• Holographic gravity can be unmixed at leading order.

My investigations on QG in AdS continued in [1711.03903], [1802.06889] and [1912.01047]. The most complete version of the one-loop bootstrap program valid for all Kaluza-Klein four-point correlators in N=4 SYM at strong coupling was given in [1912.01047]. A further improvement on this came from [2007.09176] . The issue was that the flat space limit, developed by Joao Penedones, when considered at one-loop, was consistent with the CFT results but it was not manifest. To solve this problem, in [2007.09176] I computed the Mellin amplitudes for one-loop correlators, and introduced a formalism to make manifest the Kaluza-Klein level of the sphere compactification. This formalism is nowadays called AdSxS Mellin space. Then, I showed that the AdSxS Mellin amplitude of Kaluza-Klein correlators admits a generalized flat space limit in which both AdS and S combine together to reconstruct the higher dimensional flat space of string theory. Soon after my results in [2007.09176], it was possible to use the same method to start exploring curvature corrections to two-derivative gravity, and other beautiful results.

Since 2020 I have been actively working on the analytic bootstrap for correlation functions, and its applications to the study of quantum gravity in AdS/CFT and string theory. Based on this line of research, in 2022-2023 I was awarded with a Ramon y Cajal fellowship, and from 2025 I am project manager in Madrid of the staff-exchange program “High-energy Intelligence” which was awarded by the European Union, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions.

Invited speaker:

• IGAP Trieste, SISSA, Italy, 2025. Title: “ Dynamics of Heavy Operators”. Recorded video.
• Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, 2024. Title: “ The geometry of correlation functions with huge operators”. Info available at CFT and Holography: Heavy and Thermal States and Black Holes.
• KITP Santa Barbara, California, 2023. Title: “Gravity from algebra: modern field theory methods for holography”. Recorded video.
• Perimeter Institute, Canada, 2022. Title: “Conformal blocks in diverse dimensions and the superconformal cauchy identity”. Recorded video.
• Shing-Tung Yau Centre of Southeast University, China, 2021. Title: “Single Particle Operators and their Correlators in Free N=4 SYM”. Recorded video.
• DESY, Hamburg, Germany, 2019. Title: “The Grand Slam of IIB Supergravity: 4-point @ 1-Loop”. Info available at Quantum field theory meets gravity.
• Perimeter Institute, Canada, 2019. Title: “N=4 SYM and IIB Supergravity at 1-Loop”. Recorded video.
• Barcelona University, Spain, 2019. Title “Quantum Gravity from CFT”. Info available at Iberian Strings.
• Oxford University, UK, 2016. Title: “Geometry and Entanglement in Type IIB Holography”. Info available at Rudolph Peierls Centre - Seminars.
• Weizmann Institute, Israel, 2015. Title: “Geometry and Entanglement in Type IIB Supergravity”. Info available at Neve-Shalom Meetings.
• Crete University, Greece, 2014. Title “A simple holographic model of a charged lattice”. Info available at Quantum Field Theory, String Theory and Condensed Matter Physics @ Kolymbari.