Ivan Agullo
20 Feb 2026
A Winter School and Workshop on Analogue Gravity and QFT in Curved Spacetimes Organized in the Spanish Pyrenees
The event Analogue Gravity in 2026 consisted of a winter school combined with a workshop. It took place from 8 January to 17 January at the Centro de Ciencias Pedro Pascual in Benasque, a mountain village in the Spanish Pyrenees. The event was organized by Ivan Agullo (Louisiana State University), Alessandro Fabbri (University of Valencia), Maxime Jacquet (Sorbonne University), and Justin Wilson (Louisiana State University). The school included lecture courses on quantum field theory in curved spacetime, relativistic quantum information, theoretical and experimental aspects of Bose-Einstein condensates, quantum fluids of light, nonlinear optics, and the quantum Hall effect.
During the workshop, invited speakers and contributed talks presented recent research on both theoretical and experimental aspects of quantum field theory simulators in curved spacetimes, realized across a variety of experimental platforms. Particular emphasis was placed on three main topics:
(i) the observability of quantum correlations (entanglement) in pair-creation processes;
(ii) the study and recreation of nonlinear effects in field theory; and
(iii) the possibility of using analog gravity systems to gain insight into physics beyond classical gravity.
In connection with the ISLQG, Daniele Oriti delivered an invited talk on the group field theory description of cosmological spacetimes, where the cosmological dynamics is extracted from the mean field hydrodynamics of an underlying condensate (the extension beyond mean field to include collective Bogoliubov excitations was presented by Andrea Calcinari). Daniele Oriti also provided stimulating suggestions for how such quantum gravity ideas might be simulated in laboratory settings.