Netta Engelhardt

We show that bulk operators lying between the outermost extremal surface and the asymptotic boundary admit a simple boundary reconstruction in the classical limit. This is the converse of the Python's lunch conjecture, which proposes that operators with support between the minimal and outermost (quantum) extremal surfaces - e.g. the interior Hawking partners - are highly complex.

I will give a holographic argument in favor of the AdS Penrose inequality, which conjectures a lower bound on the total mass in terms of the area of apparent horizons. This inequality is often viewed as a test of cosmic censorship. Time permitting, I’ll also discuss a generalization to charged black holes and connections with a quasi-local energy and the second law for apparent horizons.  

Seminar given remotely. 

I will describe a procedure for reconstructing the metric of a general holographic spacetime (up to an overall conformal factor) from distinguished spatial slices - “light-cone cuts” - of the conformal boundary. This reconstruction can be applied to bulk points in causal contact with the boundary. I will also discuss a prescription for obtaining the light-cone cuts from divergences of correlators in the dual field theory.

I will present a new area law in General Relativity. This new area law holds on local analogues of event horizons that have an independent thermodynamic significance due to the Bousso bound. I will also discuss a quantum generalization of this more local notion of thermodynamics.

Using holography, I will describe an approach for understanding the physics of a big bang singularity by translating the problem into the language of the dual quantum field theory. Certain two-point correlators in the dual field theory are sensitive to near-singularity physics in a dramatic way, and this provides an avenue for investigating how strong quantum gravity effects in string theory might modify the classical description of the big bang.