Particle Theory Seminar: Liam Fitzpatrick, BU, “On Information Loss in AdS3/CFT2”

Event time: 
Tuesday, October 4, 2016 - 3:30pm to 4:30pm
Location: 
Sloane Physics Laboratory (SPL), 52 See map
217 Prospect St.
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

“On Information Loss in AdS3/CFT2”

We discuss information loss from black hole physics in AdS3, focusing on two sharp signatures infecting CFT2 correlators at large central charge c: `forbidden singularities’ arising from Euclidean-time periodicity due to the effective Hawking temperature, and late-time exponential decay in the Lorentzian region. We show that these signatures can be derived from the behavior of the Virasoro conformal blocks at large central charge. At finite c, we compute non-perturbative effects that resolve the unitarity-violation from forbidden singularities. Finally, we elaborate on the non-perturbative behavior of Virasoro blocks by classifying all `saddles’ that can contribute for arbitrary values of external and internal operator dimensions in the semiclassical large central charge limit, and discuss their potential to resolve the problem of late-time decay in the Lorentzian regime.