Lessons from black holes about quantum gravity

by Prof. Ramy Brustein (CERN)

Wednesday 24 Nov 2010, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

TH Theory Conference Room (CERN)

The ongoing quest for understanding quantum black holes is motivated by the challenges that they pose to the basic principles of quantum mechanics and to gravity. I will review some basic facts about the thermodynamics of quantum black holes and the paradoxes that their existence apparently implies. Then I will explain the consequences of assuming that the global quantum state of the black hole and the unitary quantum evolution operator are well defined. The results hint towards a surprising possibility that only matter should be quantized and gravity should not. I will end with a brief discussion of the relevance of quantum black holes to the physics of the current heavy ion collisions at CERN.