Events at 402 Classroom, Physics South (in person seminar)

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Khovanov showed, more than 20 years ago, that Jones polynomial emerges as an Euler characteristic of a homology theory. The knot categorification problem is to find a uniform description of this theory, for all gauge groups, which originates from physics, or from geometry. In these lectures, I will describe two solutions to this problem, which originate in string theory, and … Read More

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Understanding the fate of semi-classical black hole solutions at very late times is one of the most important open questions in quantum gravity. In this paper, we provide a path integral definition of the volume of the black hole interior and study it at arbitrarily late times for black holes in various models of two-dimensional gravity. Because of a novel … Read More

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Khovanov showed, more than 20 years ago, that Jones polynomial emerges as an Euler characteristic of a homology theory. The knot categorification problem is to find a uniform description of this theory, for all gauge groups, which originates from physics, or from geometry. In these lectures, I will describe two solutions to this problem, which originate in string theory, and … Read More

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Abstract: Recently it has been shown that JT gravity is dual to a hermitian matrix model. This means that JT gravity is not dual to a single boundary theory, as we would expect from higher dimensional examples of AdS/CFT, but rather to an ensemble of theories. In this talk I will present a gravitational theory that interpolates between JT gravity, … Read More

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Abstract: The Covariant Entropy Bound implies a singularity in the domain of dependence of hyperentropic regions, i.e., regions whose entropy exceeds their boundary area. This extends the Penrose singularity theorem to a large class of compact regions. The quantum version of the bound implies a similar theorem in settings where quantum effects are dominant, such as a black hole after … Read More