Coarse-graining and gravitational thermodynamics

by Simon, J. (Berkeley)

Tuesday 5 Jun 2007, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

TH Auditorium (CERN)

We report on recent ideas concerning the notion of typical states in quantum systems with large quantum numbers, its relation to black hole entropy and the emergence of classical spacetime and origin of gravitational entropy after explicit coarse-graining of the microscopic quantum mechanical data characterising the individual microstates. We exemplify these ideas for the 1/2 BPS sector of N=4 Super Yang-Mills, but will report on natural extensions for 1/2 mesonic BPS sectors in generic N=1 superconformal field theories, mentioning the difficulties to achieve these goals and possible avenues to overcome them.