Talks

Small naked singularities—those not shielded by a macroscopic event horizon—are ubiquitous in classical General Relativity. Their existence constitutes apparent violations of the weak cosmic censorship conjecture, which asserts that physically reasonable solutions should appear regular to asymptotic observers. In this talk, we will show how the inclusion of stringy and quantum effects resolves these pathologies by uplifting naked singularities into fully regular configurations. Focusing on critical gravitational collapse as a concrete example, we demonstrate that a proper quantum treatment replaces naked singularity formation with black hole formation. This suggests that cosmic censorship is not fundamentally a property of classical General Relativity, but rather emerges only once quantum gravitational effects are taken into account.

Since the 1980s, simulation of quantum many-body systems has been a leading candidate for practical quantum advantage. Yet computing thermal equilibrium properties, a central pillar of this vision, still lacks an end-to-end algorithmic solution. Today, I will present a general-purpose algorithmic and analytic framework for preparing quantum thermal states as a quantum analog of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, and as a workable model of nature’s system-bath interaction.