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In this talk, I will show that light cones in MInkowski spacetime are a beautiful analoue of black hole horizons in curved spacetime. To do so, I will prove the analogue of the four laws of black hole thermodynamics in this setting. This is what we called light cone thermodynamics. More precisely, I will consider null surfaces defined by the out-going and in-falling wave fronts emanating from and arriving at a sphere in Minkowski spacetime. Such null surfaces, made of pieces of light cones, are bifurcate conformal Killing horizons for suitable conformally stationary observers. They can be extremal and non-extremal depending on the radius of the shining sphere. Such conformal Killing horizons have a constant light cone (conformal) temperature, given by the standard expression in terms of the surface gravity. Considering exchanges of conformally invariant energy across the conformal horizon, one can prove, in perturbation theory, a first law where entropy changes are given by 1/4 of the changes of the area of the bifurcate surface in Planck units. In the extremal case they become light cones associated with a single event; these have vanishing temperature as well as vanishing entropy. I will conclude with possible generalisations and applications of such results.

Compatibility of asymptotic safety with UV-completions of matter theories may constrain the underlying microscopic dynamics of quantum gravity. Within truncated RG-flows, a weak-gravity bound originates from the loss of quantum scale-invariance in the matter system. Further constraints could arise when linking Planck-scale to electroweak-scale dynamics. Within the constrained region, gravitationally induced scale-invariance could UV-complete the Standard Model, and moreover explain free parameters such as fermion masses and gauge couplings.

When two black holes merge, they 'ringdown' as they settle into a final Kerr black hole. The ringdown part of the gravitational wave signal probes the strong field gravity, enabling us to test the general theory of relativity (GR) in that regime. In this talk, I will focus on one particular challenge associated with the ringdown - "When does a ringdown start during a binary black hole merger?". Then I will end the talk with a brief summary of our prospects to perform GR tests with the ringdown signals using the current and future ground-based gravitational wave observatory.

The SYK model and its variants are a new class of large N conformal field theories. In this talk, we solve SYK, computing all connected correlation functions. Our techniques and results for summing all leading large N Feynman diagrams are applicable to a significantly broader class of theories. 

In general relativity causal relations between any pair of events is uniquely determined by locally predefined variables - the distribution of matter-energy degrees of freedom in the events' past light-cone. Under the assumption of locally predefined causal order, agents performing freely chosen local operations on an initially local quantum state cannot violate Bell inequalities. However, superposition of massive objects can effectively lead to "entanglement" in the temporal order between groups of local operations, enabling the violation of the inequalities. This shows that temporal orders between events can be "indefinite" in non-classical space-times.