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Entanglement is a paradigmatic example of quantum correlations, a presumed reason for the superior performance of quantum computation and an obvious divider of states and processes into classical and quantum. In the last decade all these notions were challenged. Entanglement does not capture the totality of non-classical behavior. Quantum discord (in its different versions) is a more general measure of quantum correlations. It can be related to the advantage in some tasks like the extraction of work from a Szilrad heat engine using Maxwell's demons with various resources. The discord turns out to be the difference between the work extracted from a given bipartite system using a a global and a local strategy. Different strategies relate to different definitions of discord, but all definitions agree on zero, so "classical" systems are universal to all heat engines. One way of identifying a task as quantum or classical is by examining the quantum resources required to implement it. This can be done by examining the entanglement required for a LOCC implementation of the task. Creation (or non-creation) of entanglement as a result of its implementation is not enough to identify these resources. An example is a bi-local implementation of an entangling quantum gate (C-NOT) by LOCC with unentagled input and output states. This lack of entanglement does not guarantee the LOCC implementability. A method to determine if entanglement resources are required is to track the change in quantum discord during the process.

The multiscale entanglement renormalization ansatz can be reformulated in terms of a causality constraint on discrete quantum dynamics. This causal structure is that of de Sitter space with a flat spacelike boundary, where the volume of a spacetime region corresponds to the number of variational parameters it contains.

Violation of unitarity in black hole evaporation has been puzzling physicist since the seminal work of Hawking in the seventies. Although there are hopes for a resolution of the problem in a full theory of quantum gravity, it has eluded us so far. Even less ambitious efforts considering only quantum corrections beyond the external field approximation have proven hard to attack in 4 dimensions. All these obstacles directed researchers to investigate the black hole evaporation problem in simpler 2-dimensional models. In this talk, we will present results on a new investigation of one of these models, the 2-dimensional Callan-Giddings-Harvey-Strominger (CGHS) model. Using a combination of analytical and high precision numerical tools, we are able to resolve CGHS black hole evaporation within the mean field approximation all the way to the point where the black hole area vanishes. Our results confirm some of the assumptions of the standard paradigm, and strongly suggest the recovery of unitarity within the full quantum theory. On the other hand, there are several surprising new results, in particular remarkable universal behavior in the evaporation of initially macroscopic black holes. This suggests that information about the collapsing matter that formed the black hole can not be recovered from the evaporation radiation. Though this separation of the questions of information loss and unitarity is peculiar to the 2-dimensional model, insights into the higher dimensional case can still be garnered. Details of the numerical methods used will also be discussed.

Hawking's discovery of black holes radiance along with Bekenstein's conjecture of the generalized second law of thermodynamics inspired a conceptually pleasing connection between gravity, thermodynamics and quantum theory. However, the discovery that the spectrum of the radiation is in fact thermal, together with the no-hair theorem, has brought along with it some undesirable consequences, most notably the information loss paradox. There have been many proposals to the resolution of this paradox, with the most natural resolution being that during the time of collapse the radiation given off is not completely thermal and can carry small amounts of information with it. In this talk, we will revisit the so-called pre-Hawking radiation given off during the scenario of gravitational collapse by utilizing the so-called functional Schroedinger equation (FSE) and quantum kinetic equation (QKE). Here we find that the spectrum never becomes thermal and discuss the reasons for this. Finally we will discuss the implications of this result, as well as previous results, toward the resolution of the information paradox.

We construct the q-deformed spinfoam vertex amplitude using Chern-Simons theory on the boundary 3-sphere of the 4-simplex. The rigorous definition involves the construction of Vassiliev-Kontsevich invariant for trivalent knot graph. Under the semiclassical asymptotics, the q-deformed spinfoam amplitude reproduce Regge gravity with cosmological constant at nondegenerate critical configurations.

In general relativity, the fields on a black hole horizon are obtained from those in the bulk by pullback and restriction. In quantum gravity, it would be natural to obtain them in the same manner. This is not fully realized in the quantum theory of isolated horizons in loop quantum gravity, in which a Chern-Simons phase space on the horizon is quantized separately from the bulk. I will outline an approach in which the quantum horizon degrees of freedom are simply components of the quantized bulk degrees of freedom. A condition is imposed on the quantum states to encode the existence of a horizon. I will present evidence that solutions to this condition have properties on the horizon that are remarkably similar to those of Chern-Simons theory. Instrumental in formulating the horizon condition are novel flux operators that use the Duflo isomorphism and seem to represent some type of quantum deformed SU(2). I will review their definition and summarize what I know about their properties.

In this talk I will describe how to calculate the exact partition function for free bosons on the plane with lacunae using world line effective field theory. It will be shown that the partition function for a plane with two spherical holes can be calculated by matching exactly for the infinite set of Wilson coefficients and then performing the ensuing Gaussian integration. This same partition function can also be calculated using conformal field theory technique and the equality of the two results will be shown. I will demonstrate that there is an exact correspondence between the Wilson coefficients (susceptabilities) in the effective field theory and the weights of the individual excitations of the closed string coherent state on the boundary. The partition function for the case of three holes, where CFT techniques necessitate a closed form for the map from the corresponding closed string pants diagram, is still calculable within the EFT. I will also show how conformal mappings can be used within the matching procedure to calculate the partition function for elliptically shaped boundaries. Finally I will show that the Wilson coefficients for the case of quartic and higher order kernels, where standard CFT techniques are no longer applicable, can also be completely determined.