Search Talks

I will revisit the canonical quantization of General Relativity in the self-dual formulation in the presence of a cosmological constant, discussing the normalizability of graviton states over the de Sitter spacetime. Time permitting, I will explain how the physics of the Hamiltonian constraint is analogous to the quantum Hall effect, with the cosmological constant playing the role of a quantum gravitational Hall resistivity.

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.

In this talk, I will argue that the universal structure of the corner algebra offers a new perspective on quantum gravity, in which the representation theory of this algebra plays a role as fundamental as that of the Poincaré algebra in quantum field theory. I will discuss the representation theory of the (quantum) universal and extended corner symmetries in a simplified model of spherically symmetric spacetimes, where the corner reduces to a point and the algebra correspondingly simplifies. Furthermore, I will propose a purely algebraic procedure for gluing regions in the quantum theory, compute the entanglement entropy, and derive the entropy–area law for a class of specific coherent states.