Higgs Chat with Colloquium Speaker Larus Thorlacius (University of Iceland).
Find out about the favourite times of his career (it may or may not involve basketball), the different academic cultures in the US and Iceland, how his father was "Mr Science" in Iceland.
Black Hole Informatics
Hawking's black hole information paradox is a subject of long-standing
debate that has inspired radical ideas about the interplay between
gravity and quantum physics at a fundamental level. I will review the
formulation of the paradox in the context of a semiclassical effective
field theory of gravity and briefly appraise some proposed resolutions.
The remainder of the lecture will focus on a holographic view of black
holes provided by a gravity theory with a gauge theory dual. The
paradox must then be resolved in favour of unitary evolution and the
challenge is to implement unitarity on the gravity side of the duality.
Recent progress on this front, involving generalised entropy and
entanglement islands, will be briefly discussed at the end.