Video Lectures

Part 1: In this talk, I will discuss an entropic puzzle in JT gravity and its resolution, which requires taking into account non-perturbative effects in the gravitational path integral. In JT gravity, which is dual to a random matrix ensemble, the...

In this talk I will describe new results establishing the existence of a strong spectral gap for  geometrically finite, n dimensional, hyperbolic manifold with critical exponent greater than (n−1)/2. This settles a conjecture of Mohammadi and Oh...

Classical random walks have long served as useful intuition for the dynamics of light scalar fields in de Sitter space. This description can be shown to arise from QFT on a fixed dS background, via RG flow. The RG approach also permits corrections...

Do typical black hole microstates have semiclassical interiors? I will present a constructive approach to this question, where we prepare ensembles of black hole interiors with long wormholes using Brownian matter sources. Evaluating the frame...

The path integral of pure 3D gravity is formulated on a finite region of spacetime, with boundary conditions that fix dihedral angles or geodesic lengths. This amplitude calculates statistics of black hole matrix elements in the dual CFT. The fixed...

It has recently been understood from several points of view that the Hilbert space of quantum gravity in a closed universe has dimension one.  It has also been argued that this problem can be ameliorated by explicitly including the observer in the...

Supermassive black hole mergers are extraordinary cosmic phenomena characterized by their immense energy release, producing gravitational waves that can rival the total light output of all stars in the universe within a short time frame. These...

I will review the Penrose and Wall singularity theorems and describe their limitations. Following Shahbazi-Moghaddam, I will argue that semiclassical gravity in the infinite species limit becomes an exact theory whose metric is defined on all scales...