Understanding the quantum properties of black holes and cosmological spacetimes is one of the most profound problems in modern theoretical physics, whose resolution requires a framework where general relativity and quantum mechanics are unified.

This project proposes to combine the crucial conceptual and technical progresses that occurred in string theory over the last two decades (D-branes, gauge/gravity duality, holography, etc.) with a set of very recent new ideas, to explicitly build quantum models of black holes and cosmologies, and study in details their properties from different points of view (thermodynamics, microstate counting, emergent geometry, probe analysis). Some of the key tools the researchers plan to use are : gauged matrix quantum mechanical models of D-particles, the associated theory of D-particle probes and its link with the theory of open quantum systems, the limit of a large number of spacetime dimensions as well as lower-dimensional toy models.

Principal investigators: Stéphane Detournay et Frank Ferrari, Service de Physique Théorique et Mathématique


Spokesperson

Frank Ferrari

Mathematical physics of fundamental interactions
Faculty of Sciences

Dates
Created on August 31, 2018