Speaker
Alex Maloney
Description
Abstract:
I will continue to explore the idea that certain theories of gravity in Anti-de Sitter space are dual to an average over an ensemble of quantum theories, rather than to a specific quantum theory. The average over Narain’s family of two-dimensional conformal field theories which describe free bosons is given by the Siegel-Weil formula, which can be computed at any genus and for disconnected boundaries. The result takes the form of a sum over geometries as one would expect in a theory of gravity. But the gravitational theory looks more like a Chern-Simons theory than like Einstein gravity, and several mysteries remain.
