Colloquium – Julian Sonner

Julian Sonner, University of Geneva

The chaotic inner workings of quantum black holes

Black holes are an experimental fact of life, one of the simplest and most robust consequences of our classical understanding of the gravitational force. Yet, they are among the most extreme and mysterious objects known to science. For a theoretical physicist, black holes are the thorn in the side of quantum mechanics, which continues to confront us with the inadequacies of our understanding of the gravitational force. In this talk I will introduce some of the paradoxical properties that are associated with black holes, from their extreme propensity to sow chaos, to their seemingly unique ability to destroy information. I will then describe recent progress on understanding the quantum nature of gravity, which attempts to weave the quantum-chaotic and information-theoretic clues mentioned above into a new statistical mechanical understanding of black holes and the gravitational field more generally. I will conclude by describing very recent work on constructing quantum geometry from the principles of quantum chaos.

April 18, 2024 @ 4:00pm Central in Stevenson 4327; reception beforehand at 3:30pm in Stevenson 6333

Host: A Lupsasca