Topic: Black holes, wormholes and firewalls

Speaker: Prof. Zhenbin Yang

Coordinates: PCFT C1124, 16:00, Tuesday November 7 and Thursday November 9

Abstract: The study of black hole system has been a major focus of quantum gravity researchers. It serves as a valuable theoretical laboratory for testing our understanding of general relativity and quantum mechanics, and more fundamentally, the connection between spacetime and quantum entanglement. Recent years, significant progress has been made with the development of a simple holographic model that is called the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model. We will review the duality between SYK model and Jackiw–Teitelboim (JT) gravity, which governs the gravitational dynamics of near-extremal black holes, including numerical simulations of SYK correlators dominated by gravitational effects. This talk will then be followed by a discussion of recent theoretical advances on black hole physics based on the SYK/JT duality, including the traversable wormhole protocol, the Page curve of Hawking radiation, and the formation of firewalls in black hole typical states due to large baby universe emission process. We will emphasize on the role of spacetime wormholes in these developments.