Week 13.03.2022 – 19.03.2022

We read the book on Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime and Black Hole Thermodynamics by Robert M. Wald.

This is an online club held every Thursday 4:15pm-5:15pm on teams. Contact: george.papadopoulos@kcl.ac.uk

In these lectures, we will present two seemingly different theories. The first one is a theory of gravity in two dimensions, called Jackiw-Teitelboim (JT) gravity, that is relevant in the context of higher-dimensional, near-extremal black holes. The second one is a quantum mechanical theory of fermions — with no gravity — called the Sachdev, Ye and Kitaev (SYK) model. We will explore precisely how JT gravity emerges from the SYK model by studying their actions, correlation functions and thermodynamic properties. This constitutes the simplest toy model of what theoretical physicists now call the holographic principle.