New developments in quantum black hole

How should we understand black holes at a quantum mechanical level? In the past years, we have made dramatic progress in answering this question, from a better understanding of how information can escape from a black hole to exact gravitational calculations of black hole entropies. In this talk, I will describe some of the advancements we have made in understanding black hole thermodynamics: I will describe how quantum gravity corrections drastically alter the physics of black holes at low temperatures, how such effects completely change the dynamical evolution of a single charged black hole when left alone to evaporate, and how, in special cases, we can now compute the entropy of black holes with arbitrary precision without relying on a UV completion of quantum gravity. Along the way, I will point out several parallels between phenomena that we have seen in the past century in atomic physics and novel effects that we can now explicitly compute for black holes.

Speaker: Luca Iliesiu, UC Berkeley