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Project

Asymptotically flat holography from the bottom up (FWOTM946)

Many of the fundamental questions in quantum gravity deal with understanding its classical limit. For example, the celebrated Hawking information loss problem is that quantum theories conserve information whereas classical gravity does not. Do we need to discard quantum theory or can this be understood as a consequence of the classical limit?

Holography is a useful tool for studying the physics of black holes and quantum gravity by relating them to the physics of conformal field theories. One application is to the corresponding classical limit of quantum gravity.

However, this holographic relation has a key unphysical assumption: it only applies to quantum gravity in a box. If we remove the box, as we must to describe experiments we could perform in a lab, then gravity is no longer dual to a conformal field theory. progress has been made in identifying the symmetries of the corresponding dual theory, know as BMS symmetry.

I propose to remedy this unphysical assumption by studying the classical limit of theories with BMS symmetry. This will provide new insights into physically relevant theories of quantum gravity, including understanding the information loss problem as a feature of he classical limit. I am ideally placed to undertake this research as I bring a strong background in conventional holographic techniques to the study of BMS symmetries, enabling cross-fertilisation between the fields.
Date:1 Oct 2019 →  1 Mar 2021
Keywords:Holography
Disciplines:Theoretical particle physics, Field theory and string theory