Quantum gravity and black holes (Winter 2016)

This is the website with all the information about the reading course that I am organizing this semester. Officially the course is PHYS 741: Superstring Theory in the university's database. During this semester we will follow closely the lecture notes from a course thaught by Thom Hartman at Cornell last year. The main reference is then Hartman's webpage. The lecture notes and the problem sets are there.

The major subjects covered in the course are: Hawking radiation, black hole thermodynamics, ADM formulation of GR, conformal field theory, AdS/CFT, (holographic) entanglement entropy.

Format of the course

We meet on Tuesdays and Fridays from 10:00 to 11:30 in room 326 of the physics building. Alex Maloney is the official professor for the course and he will join us once a week to discuss, answer questions and suggest problems.

The Friday meetings are discussions about the subject of the week. Everyone reads a set of lectures by themselves during the week and sends questions on what he read to the leader no later than Thursday. The leader combines and organizes the questions and the meeting is focused on answering the questions together. The leader notes the questions that were not completely answered so that we can discuss them further with Alex.

The Tuesday meetings start with someone working out some of the problems that are in the lectures on the board. Because of the limited time, the person selects the most interesting ones. Everyone is supposed to have at least looked at the problems so that we can solve them together in class. The second half is a discussion with Alex on the questions that were not answered on the previous Friday and on the subject in general.

Schedule

The schedule with the subjects that we cover every week and the people who are leader is here. Bellow are the lists of questions that we have every week.

Week 1 (lectures 1 and 2)     Week 2 (lecture 3)     Week 3 (lectures 4 and 5)

Week 4 (lectures 6 and 7)     Week 5 (lectures 8 and 10)     Week 6 (lectures 11, 12 and 13)

Week 7 (lectures 14 and 15)     Week 8 (lecture 15 and Witten's paper)     Week 9 (lecture 16)

Week 10 (lecture 17 and Maldacena's paper)     Week 11 (lectures 18 and 19)     Week 12 (lectures 20, 21 and 22)

Week 13 (lecture 23)     Week 14 (lectures 24, 25 and 26)

References

The main reference that we use is the notes by Hartman but there are many references mentioned in the lectures. I list here the references that we should use since they are highly recommended.

  • Spacetime and Geometry: An introduction to General Relativity, S. Carroll (textbook)
  • String Theory in a Nutshell, E. Kiritsis (textbook)
  • General Relativity, R. Wald (textbook)
  • Conformal Field Theory, P. Di Francesco, P. Mathieu, D. Senechal (textbook)
  • Jerusalem Lectures on Black Holes and Quantum Information, D. Harlow (1409.1231)
  • The dynamics of General Relativity, R. Arnowitt, S. Deser, C.W. Misner (0405109)
  • Anti De Sitter Space And Holography, E. Witten (9802150)
  • Eternal Black holes in AdS, J. Maldacena (0106112)
  • String theory volume 1, J. Polchinski (textbook)