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.

Anshul started his journey at King’s during his undergrad in Mathematics. He then completed his MSc in Complex Systems Modelling. Becoming interested in all things data, he completed his PhD in the Financial Mathematics group under the supervision of Tiziana Di Matteo with a thesis on ‘Applications of Dimensionality Reduction in Econophysics’. For the last year, he has been working at Tesco as a data scientist, whilst volunteering in leading the analytics team at a charity called Lotus Project.

The Teams Meeting Link is below:

https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_NTNhYTYxMjQtMGM1YS00YTM4LTliNTQtZjVhOWZhOGNmNDcw%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%228370cf14-16f3-4c16-b83c-724071654356%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22d0ab862e-769f-41f8-ac51-282fb61fd3c4%22%7d