Steve Giddings

A fundamental problem of quantum gravity is to understand the quantum evolution of black holes.  While aspects of their evolution are understood asymptotically, a more detailed description of their evolving wavefunction can be provided.  This gives a possible foundation for studying effects that unitarize this evolution, which in turn may provide important clues regarding the quantum nature of gravity.

 

A quantum theory of gravity is expected to be described by a Hilbert space endowed with additional mathematical structure appropriate for describing gravitational physics. I discuss aspects of this structure that can be inferred perturbatively, along with connections to arguments for holography and nonperturbative questions.

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.

Remote talk by teleconference

Much work on quantum gravity has focussed on short-distance problems such as non-renormalizability and singularities. However, quantization of gravity raises important long-distance issues, which may be more important guides to the conceptual advances required. These include the problems of black hole information and gauge invariant observables, and those of inflationary cosmology. An overview of aspects of these problems, and apparent connections, will be given.

TBA

I will survey some of the physics of TeV-scale black hole production, as well as outstanding issues. I will also discuss some of the conceptual issues surrounding high-energy black hole production.