Quantum Gravity

Event horizons are the defining feature of classical black holes. They are the key ingredient of the information loss paradox which, as paradoxes in quantum foundations, is built on a combination of predictions of quantum theory and counterfactual classical features. Within the semi-classical theory we investigate the possibility that black hole radiation still does not allow for a finite time crossing of the Schwarzschild radius of collapsing matter as seen by distant observers. The exact form of the pre-Hawking radiation is not yet settled, and we make only minimal assumptions about its nature.

We analyze the time evolution of a spherically-symmetric collapsing matter from the point of view that black holes evaporate by nature. We obtain a self-consistent solution of the semi-classical Einstein equation. The solution indicates that the collapsing matter forms a dense object and evaporates without horizon or singularity, and it has a surface but looks like an ordinary black hole from the outside. Any object we recognize as a black hole should be such an object. In the case of stationary black holes that are formed adiabatically in the heat bath, the area law is reproduced by integrating the entropy density over the interior volume. This result implies that the information is stored inside the object.

A quantum system behaves classically when quantum probabilities are high for coarse-grained histories correlated in time by deterministic laws. That is as true for the flight of a tennis ball as for the behavior of spacetime geometry in gravitational collapse. Classical spacetime may be available only in patches of configuration space with quantum transitions between them. Global structures of general relativity. such as event horizons may not be available. We consider the quantum dynamics of gravitational collapse in a model in which classical spacetime breaks down because the wave function spreads over a large ensemble of classical end states as envisioned in the fuzzball proposal. Probabilities of coarse-grained observables are highly peaked around the classical black hole values. By contrast, probabilities for finer-grained observables probing the near horizon region are broadly distributed, and no notion of `averaging' applies. This means that the formation of fuzzballs may result significant observational features including a novel type of gravitational wave burst associated with tunneling between classical solutions.

Postulates are given for a quantum-gravitational description of black holes, that include correspondence with a quantum field theory description for freely falling observers crossing the horizon. These lead to “soft gravitational structure,” which can transfer information to outgoing radiation either with or without large metric perturbations. Prospects for observing such departures from the standard field-theoretic description of black holes will be briefly discussed.

: Astrophysical black hole candidates might be horizonless ultra-compact objects. Of particular interest is the plausible fundamental connection with quantum gravity. The puzzle is then why we shall expect Planck scale corrections around the horizon of a macroscopic black hole. Taking asymptotically free quadratic gravity as a possible candidate of UV completion of general relativity, I will show how the would-be horizon can be naturally replaced by a tiny interior as dictated by the dynamics. The new horizonless 2-2-hole, as a quite generic static solution sourced by sufficiently dense matter, may then be the nearly black endpoint of gravitational collapse. In the era of gravitational wave astronomy, echoes in the post-merger phase provide a great opportunity to probe such scenario. Given the uncertainties associated with the waveform of echoes, I will discuss some model-independent search strategies, where the primary task is to find the time delay between echoes. The search range is then motivated by the Planck scale deviation outside the would-be horizon.

The standard way to understand quantum corrected black holes leads to the information loss paradox and the lifetime dilemma. A radical way out of this situation is to give up a hypothesis which is tacitly assumed in the vast majority of works on the subject: that the classical singularity is substituted by something effectively acting as a sink for a long period of time, as seen by asymptotic observers. Eliminating this characteristic changes drastically much of the physics now associated to black holes. A nice feature of the new hypothesis it that it offers a clear possibility of experimental falsifiability with upcoming gravitational waves observations. In this talk I will discuss these possibilities.

The internal structure of extremal and near-extremal black holes in string theory involves a variety of ingredients — strings and branes — that lie beyond supergravity, yet it is often difficult to achieve quantitative control over these ingredients in a regime where the state being described approximates a black hole.  The supertube is a brane bound state that has been proposed as a paradigm for how string theory resolves black hole horizon structure.  This talk will describe how the worldsheet dynamics of strings can be solved exactly in a wide variety of supertube backgrounds, opening up the study of stringy effects in states near the black hole transition.

Black holes appear to lead to information loss, thus violating one of the fundamental tenets of Quantum Mechanics. Recent Information-Theory-based arguments imply that information loss can only be avoided if at the scale of the black hole horizon there exists a structure (commonly called fuzzball or