High energy scattering near extremal Kerr black holes and the bulk point singularity

by Matthew Dodelson

Monday 4 Oct 2021, 13:30 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

4/3-006 - TH Conference Room (CERN)

I will discuss work in progress with Ooguri on boundary correlators dual to extremal Kerr black holes. After giving a basic overview of Kerr black holes, I will review the Banados-Silk-West effect, which was originally proposed in the context of dark matter collisions around astrophysical black holes. The essence of this effect is that extremal black holes act as particle accelerators, in the sense that the center of mass energy for a collision near the horizon can be arbitrarily large. After this background, I will explain the implications of the BSW effect for boundary correlators. The relevant kinematic regime is the bulk point limit, which probes high energy collisions in the bulk. The BSW effect implies that the bulk point singularity is smoothed out over a much larger range than string scale, in a sense that I will make precise in the talk. Finally, I will discuss our attempts to design a thought experiment that probes string theory with macroscopic detectors using the bulk point correlators.