Physics

High Energy Theory Seminar

December 17, 2012 | 2:30pm - 4:00pm
I will discuss an old argument suggesting that thermodynamics of vacuum fluctuations implies that spacetime causal structure is dynamical and governed by Einstein's equation. Various probes of the consistency of this reasoning and implications for...

High Energy Theory Seminar

December 10, 2012 | 2:30pm - 4:00pm
I argue that the following three widely believed statements cannot all be true: (i) Hawking radiation is in a pure state, (ii) the information carried by the radiation is emitted from the region near the horizon, with low energy effective field...

High Energy Theory Seminar

December 07, 2012 | 1:30pm - 2:30pm
We discuss how locality in AdS duals to Conformal Field Theories emerge vis-a-vis bulk Effective Field Theory descriptions with a high-scale cut-off, and the emergence of a weakly-coupled Eikonal limit for high-spin CFT operators. First, we provide...

High Energy Theory Seminar

November 26, 2012 | 2:30pm - 3:30pm
The existence of a positive linear functional acting on the space of (differences between) conformal blocks has been shown to rule out regions in the parameter space of conformal field theories (CFTs). We argue that at the boundary of the allowed...