The Black Hole Information Paradox - Topical (PHY-412.5)

Venue: Online
Class timings: 6:30 pm -8 pm on Wednesdays and Thursdays
First meeting: 13th January 2021

Course description: 

This is an advanced elective course covering recent developments in our understanding of the black-hole information paradox. We will emphasize the broader lessons that puzzles about black-hole evaporation and the black-hole interior hold for theories of quantum gravity. The topics that we plan to cover include the following:

  1. Hawking's original formulation of the information paradox.
  2. Paradoxes involving the black-hole interior and the monogamy of entanglement.
  3. The principle of holography of information.
  4. Quantum extremal Islands.
  5. Paradoxes involving large AdS black holes
  6. Construction of the black-hole interior in AdS/CFT
  7. State dependence
  8. Fuzzballs, firewalls, and other proposals for horizon structure
We will use the recent review "Lessons from the Information Paradox" as a guide for the lectures.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.05770.pdf

Prerequisites: Quantum Field theory, general relativity, familiarity with black-hole thermodynamics and quantum fields in curved spacetime. 

Lecture details: The course will be entirely virtual.

We will have 2 virtual lectures per week starting the week of 11th January and continuing till mid-April. Each lecture will be 1.5 hours. In addition, we will have office-hours/tutorials each week for questions and discussions.

Lecture timings will be fixed later based on the convenience of the students attending.