Talks

The black hole information paradox — whether information escapes an evaporating black hole or not —  remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of theoretical physics. The apparent conflict between validity of semiclassical gravity at low energies and unitarity of quantum mechanics has long been expected to find its resolution in the deep quantum gravity regime. Recent developments in the holographic dictionary and in particular its application to entanglement, however, have shown that a semiclassical analysis of gravitational physics has a hallmark feature of unitary evolution. I will describe this recent progress and discuss some potential new avenues for working towards a resolution of the information paradox.

The Page curve describing the radiation entropy of a unitarily evaporating black hole has recently been obtained by new calculations based on the replica trick. We analyse the discrepancy between these and Hawking's original conclusions from a quantum information theory viewpoint, using in particular the quantum de Finetti theorem. The theorem implies the existence of extra information, W, which is neither part of the black hole nor the radiation, but plays the role of a reference. The entropy obtained via the replica trick can then be identified to be the entropy S(R|W) of the radiation conditioned on the reference W, whereas Hawking's original result corresponds to the non-conditional entropy S(R). The entropy S(R|W), which mathematically is an ensemble average, gains an operational meaning in an experiment with N independently prepared black holes: for large N, it equals the regularized entropy of their joint radiation, S(R_1…R_N)/N. The discrepancy between this entropy and S(R) implies that the black holes are correlated, that is geometrically captured by the replica wormholes. In total, I will give three different interpretations of the radiation entropy calculated via the replica trick. Furthermore, I will briefly discuss the implications of ensemble interpretation in light of free probability theory, which offers the tools to deal with the effect of replica symmetry breaking in a refined calculation of the radiation entropy. (Based on the joint work (https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.14653) with Renato Renner.)

Zoom Link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/93221648666?pwd=TkwrS0pMYjlLa090WCtCYjd0Nk9RZz09

I will describe an approach to extracting the physical consequences of S-duality of four-dimensional N = 4 super Yang-Mills (SYM) and its string theory dual based on SL(2,Z) spectral theory. I will show that processing S-duality in this way leads to strong consequences for the CFT data, both perturbatively and non-perturbatively in all parameters. In large-N limits, I will argue for the existence and scaling of non-perturbative effects, both at large N and at strong 't Hooft coupling. An elegant benchmark for these techniques is a certain integrated stress-tensor multiplet four-point function, whose form I will elucidate. I will explain how the ensemble average of CFT observables over the N = 4 supersymmetric conformal manifold with respect to the Zamolodchikov measure is cleanly isolated by the spectral decomposition, and will show that the large-N limit of the ensemble average is equal to the strong-coupling limit of the observable in the planar theory, which is its value in type IIB supergravity on AdS_5 x S^5. This embeds an emergent averaged holographic duality within the conventional holographic paradigm.

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/95197874062?pwd=QU4vbXNNeFVmS0hNbTVLL24wdDBndz09

Quasi-sterile neutrinos are a natural consequence of dark sectors interacting with the Standard Model (SM) sector via neutrino- and vector-portals. Essentially, quasi-sterile neutrinos are light dark sector fermions with two generic properties: (i) they mix with the active neutrinos of the SM, and (ii) they are charged under a vector mediator that couples feebly to SM matter. Various interesting phenomenological consequences result from this class of particles. In this talk, I will discuss one such consequence: new, beyond the SM matter effects that can alter in-medium neutrino oscillations. In particular, for special windows of energy and matter densities, active neutrinos can resonantly oscillate into sterile neutrinos. I will discuss how this feature could be exploited to build a quasi-sterile neutrino model that can explain the MiniBooNE and LSND anomalies, while remaining compatible with observations from long-baseline reactor- and accelerator-based neutrino experiments. I will also discuss the implications to this model from the recent MicroBooNE results, and, time permitting, from solar neutrino measurements.

Zoom Link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/95362454210?pwd=RzNCeDRkMjJXb2xNbHNkcEc1ZTdkUT09

In this talk I will assess various proposals for the source of the intuition that there is something problematic about contextuality, and argue that contextuality is best thought of in terms of fine-tuning. I will suggest that as with other fine-tuning problems in quantum mechanics, this behaviour can be understood as a manifestation of teleological features of physics. I will also introduce several formal mathematical frameworks that have been used to analyse contextuality and discuss how their results should be interpreted. 

Let K be a knot or link in the 3-sphere. I will explain how one can count minimal surfaces in hyperbolic 4-space which have ideal boundary equal to K, and in this way obtain a link invariant. In other words the number of minimal surfaces doesn’t depend on the isotopy class of the link. These counts of minimal surfaces can be organised into a two-variable polynomial which is perhaps a known polynomial invariant of the link, such as HOMFLYPT. “Counting minimal surfaces” needs to be interpreted carefully here, similar to how Gromov-Witten invariants “count” J-holomorphic curves. Indeed I will explain how these minimal surface invariants can be seen as Gromov-Witten invariants for the twistor space of hyperbolic 4-space. Whilst Gromov-Witten theory suggests the overall strategy for defining the minimal surface link-invariant, there are significant differences in how to actually implement it. This is because the geometry of both hyperbolic space and its twistor space become singular at infinity. As a consequence, the PDEs involved (both the minimal surface equation and J-holomorphic curve equation) are degenerate rather than elliptic at the boundary. I will try and explain how to overcome these complications. 

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/95847819111?pwd=MVg5dWFsNUpiZWVPL1l4Uk9PV2tZZz09