Quantum Gravity and Black Holes

Fall 2020: PHYS 57000(U) “Quantum Gravity and Black Holes”

Tue-Thu 4:30-5:45 pm; Room PHYS 338

Prerequisites: Basic familiarity with general relativity at the level of Carroll’s book (a free version is here) and basics of quantum field theory at the level of Peskin-Schroeder’s book.

Course description: We will discuss black hole thermodynamics, path integrals in quantum gravity, holography and gauge/gravity dualities, and connections to quantum information theory and entanglement.

References: We will follow the structure of Tom Hartman’s lectures notes: (Lectures on Quantum Gravity and Black Holes)

Combined with these lecture notes:

Jared Kaplan’s lecture notes: (Why Quantum Gravity?) (Lectures on AdS/CFT from the bottom up)

Hong Liu’s lecture notes and recorded videos form the course Holographic duality

Gabor Sarosi’s notes on “AdS2 holography and the SYK model”

We will use the application Slack to post course announcements, reports, discuss ideas and share interesting papers we have come across. If you are planning to attend the class please send me an email and I will add you to the course channel on Slack.

Homework:

The students should read the relevant section of the lecture notes before coming to class and submit two questions on slack. Every lecture will have homework problems that will be assigned in class and have to be submitted on Slack up to a week after the lecture.
There will be a term project and we will decide the groups in a few weeks. The videos of the lectures are available here.

Syllabus:

Click on the lecture to download the lecture note. The videos of all lectures can be found in this YouTube Channel.

• Lecture 1: Gravity in long distances (reading: Section 1 of Hartman’s lectures)
• Lecture 2: Gravity in very short distances (reading: Lecture 1 of Hong Liu’s course)
• Lecture 3: Classical Black Holes (reading: Section 2 and 3.1 of Kaplan’s notes)
• Lecture 4: Black hole thermodynamics (reading: Section 2 of Hartman’s lectures)
• Lecture 5: Gauge redundancies in gravity (reading: section 4 of Kaplan’s lectures)
• Lecture 6: Rindler space and Hawking radiation (reading: section 3 of Hartman’s lectures
• Lecture 7: Path integrals, states and operators (reading: section 4 of Hartman’s lectures)
• Lecture 8: Path integrals, and Hawking radiation (reading: section 5 of Hartman’s lectures)
• Lecture 9: Path integrals in gravity 1 (reading: section 6 of Hartman’s lectures)
• Lecture 10: Path integrals in gravity 2
• Lecture 11: Symmetries and the Hamiltonian in gravity (reading: section 8 of Hartman’s lectures)
• Lecture 12: Anti de Sitter Spacetime (reading: section 10 of Hartman’s lectures)
• Lecture 13: More on AdS physics (reading: section 2,3 of Kaplan’s Lectures)
• Lecture 14: Preview of the AdS/CFT correspondence (reading: section 4 of Kaplan’s Lectures AdS/CFT)
• Lecture 15: AdS from near horizon limits (reading: section 11 of Hartman’s notes)
• Lecture 16: Absorption cross section from D1-D5-P (reading: section 12 of Hartman’s notes)
• Lecture 17: Absorption cross section from the dual CFT (reading: section 13 of Hartman’s notes)
• Lecture 18: The statement of AdS/CFT (reading: section 14 of Hartman’s notes)
• Lecture 19: Generalized free fields and Large N (reading: section 6 of Kaplan’s lectures on AdS/CFT)
• Lecture 20: Correlation functions in AdS/CFT (reading: section 15 of Hartman’s notes)
• Lecture 21: Black hole thermodynamics in AdS (reading: section 16 of Hartman’s notes)
• Lecture 22: Eternal black holes and entanglement (reading: section 17 of Hartman’s notes)
• Lecture 23: Holographic entanglement entropy I (reading: section 19 and section 21 of Hartman’s notes)
• Lecture 24: Holographic entanglement entropy II (reading: section 22 of Hartman’s notes)
• Lecture 25: Quantum gravity in two dimensions (reading: “Motivation” section of Sarosi’s notes)
• Lecture 26: JT gravity (reading: “Nearly AdS2 spaces” section of Sarosi’s notes up to the beginning of section 3.5)
• Lecture 27: SYK model I (reading: “SYK model” section of Sarosi’s notes to the beginning of section 4.5)
• Lecture 28: SYK model II (watch this talk by Douglas Stanford)
• Lecture 29: Black holes and quantum information (reading Entropy of Hawking Radiation)

If you have any questions/comments or suggestions please do not hesitate to send me a message.