Session M11: Invited Session: Quantum Gravity in the 100th Anniversary of General Relativity

Black Holes and Firewalls

Our modern understanding of space, time, matter, and even reality itself arose from the three great revolutions of the early twentieth century: special relativity, general relativity, and quantum mechanics. But a century later, this work is unfinished. Many deep connections have been discovered, but the full form of a unified theory incorporating all three principles is not known. Thought experiments and paradoxes have often played a key role in figuring out how to fit theories together. For the unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics, black holes have been an important arena. I will talk about the quantum mechanics of black holes, the information paradox, and the latest version of this paradox, the firewall. The firewall points to a conflict between our current theories of spacetime and of quantum mechanics. It may lead to a new understanding of how these are connected, perhaps based on quantum entanglement.   

Gravity from entanglement close to a quantum critical point

Entanglement entropy (EE) in quantum many-body systems reveal interesting non-local aspects of the state or phase of the system. For example, topological order in gapped phases may be characterized in this way. We present calculations of entanglement close to a quantum critical point with relativistic invariance that reveal the existence of an emergent gravitational theory in one higher dimension. The gravitational theory encodes the entanglement of the quantum system in an efficient way. In this way calculations of EE, a usually notoriously difficult quantity to calculate, are reduced to a simple computation in classical gravity. The answer we find is in the spirit of the AdS/CFT duality but goes beyond it since our results apply to any relativistic quantum critical point and not just the known theories with classical gravity duals.