2024-10-07 - 2024-10-11
Thomas Mertens
Ghent University
Understanding black holes and quantum gravity remains one of the biggest unsolved challenges in contemporary theoretical physics. The recent astrophysical breakthroughs have only made this even more urgent. Tackling the topic head-on in 3+1 dimensions is very difficult. However, going to lower dimensions there is more hope, and recently a lot of progress has been made in understanding aspects of quantum gravity from these lower-dimensional systems.
In this lecture set, I will introduce the 1+1d Jackiw-Teitelboim (JT) gravity model, which has been the main player in these recent developments. I will start by introducing dilaton gravity models and the classical solution to JT gravity. I will relate this to how A. Kitaev recovered this model from the SYK boundary models. Then I will slowly proceed to introduce quantum effects in JT gravity, first from a matter sector coupled to gravity, and finally for gravity itself. We will progress towards wormholes and the matrix model description of the non-perturbative effects of these gravity models. Near the end, time permitting, I will discuss other related models and where we are now in this field.
A basic background in general relativity and quantum field theory is assumed
