UNC PHYSICS AND ASTRONOMY COLLOQUIUM
Alex Maloney, McGill University
“Holography, Black Holes and Quantum Gravity”
The holographic correspondence provides a powerful tool to analyze quantum gravity. Its simplest implementation – the AdS/CFT correspondence – relates theories of quantum gravity with a negative cosmological constant to certain quantum field theories (CFTs) in one less dimension. In many cases this correspondence can be made explicit. For example, the two dimensional Ising model appears to be dual to three dimensional general relativity with a certain values of the cosmological constant. This allows us to address basic questions involving the quantum mechanics of black holes and provides a calculable framework for the computation of the “wave function of the universe” in quantum cosmology.