ABSTRACT
Despite the tremendous progress Euclidean gravitational path integrals have brought in studies of quantum black holes, its precise statistical interpretation remains not entirely clear. In this talk, I focus on the 1-loop contributions, which amounts to studying free fields living on a black hole background. For the case of a free scalar, I’ll explain in what sense the 1-loop Euclidean black hole path integral is equal to a renormalized thermal canonical partition function for the free quantum field outside the horizon in the Lorentzian signature. For spinning fields, the Euclidean path integrals exhibit a universal bulk-edge split: the bulk part captures the renormalized thermal canonical partition function described above, while the edge part is related to a special subset of quasinormal modes. I’ll comment on some ongoing work attempting to understand the nature of the edge modes living on the stretched horizon.
BIOGRAPHY
Albert Law received his PhD in physics from Columbia University in 2021. He then received the Croucher fellowship and became a postdoctoral scholar at Harvard from 2021 to 2023. He is now a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. Law’s research focuses on a theoretical curved space (called “de Sitter space”) that undergoes an accelerating expansion just like our own universe. His work has contributed to the knowledge of black holes and Euclidean path integrals in de Sitter space, an important tool in studies of semiclassical quantum gravity. Law is working with Prof. Eva Silverstein to explore a bottom-up approach to developing a microscopic model of quantum gravity in de Sitter space.
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