Talks

What is the ultimate fate of black holes? Since the discovery of Hawking evaporation process, the issue has been much discussed. Loop quantum gravity suggests that black hole could ultimately turn into white holes. In this talk, we investigate several possible mixed scenario where black holes first evaporate to a Planckian size before tunnelling to white holes. We build various spacetime models, taking Hawking backreaction into account, and we discuss some aspects of the expected phenomenology. Finally, we will draw the path for a full LQG amplitude computation that could lead to observational predictions.

I will describe some connections between the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis (ETH), the entanglement structure of generic excited eigenstates of chaotic quantum systems ("EE", arXiv:1906.04295), and the "bound on chaos" limiting the growth rate of the out-of-time-order four-point correlator in such systems ("OTOC", arXiv:1906.10808).

Higher spin symmetries are gauge symmetries sourced by massless particles with spin greater than two. When coupled with diffeomorphism, they give rise to higher spin gravity. After a review on higher spin gravity, I will discuss its holography and its embedding in the string theory. Finally I will talk about some applications of higher spin symmetry, both in string theory and in QFT. 

The discrete time-translation symmetry of a periodically-driven (Floquet) system allows for the existence of novel, nonequilibrium interacting phases of matter. A well-known example is the discrete time crystal, a phase characterized by the spontaneous breaking of this time-translation symmetry. In this talk, I will show that the presence of *multiple* time-translational symmetries, realized by quasiperiodically driving a system with two or more incommensurate frequencies, leads to a panoply of novel non-equilibrium phases of matter, both spontaneous symmetry breaking ("discrete time quasi-crystals") and topological. In order to stabilize such phases, I will outline rigorous mathematical results establishing slow heating of systems driven quasiperiodically at high frequencies. As a byproduct, I will introduce the notion of many-body localization (MBL) in quasiperiodically driven systems.

I will describe an example in which ER=EPR can be understood as a worldsheet string duality, by finding the Lorentzian continuation of the FZZ duality. The result is that string perturbation theory around the thermofield double state in a disconnected spacetime with a condensate of entangled folded strings is equivalent to string theory in a connected two sided black hole spacetime. Important ingredients are the Lorentzian interpretation of time winding vertex operators, and string theory with target space Schwinger-Keldysh contours. I will also discuss a related conjecture in AdS3-Rindler.

The core Python language is not particularly powerful or fast for numerical computing.  Fortunately, there is a large "numerical python" library, "numpy", that is a standard part of any Python-using scientist's toolkit.  I will present numpy, the associated "scientific python" library, "scipy", and the popular "matplotlib" plotting library.