Grant: Subatomic Physics Envelope - Individual

The quest for a theory that unifies gravity with quantum mechanics is one of the most important in theoretical physics today. Despite substantial progress in string theory and loop quantum gravity, much remains to be understood and the thermodynamic properties of black holes seem to provide valuable clues. One of the most striking properties of black hole thermodynamics is its apparent universality: it has the same qualitative features for all black holes, irrespective of which theory of gravity or which underlying microscopic theory one considers. It is this universal nature that motivates my study of the classical and quantum mechanics of generic black holes using a class of theories known collectively as two dimensional dilaton gravity. These theories live in one spatial dimension, and are sufficiently simple to be tractable but also sufficiently complex to provide insight into the microscopic origins of black hole thermodynamics. One of the projects I will undertake is a study of the quantum dynamics of black hole formation in this general context. A related research area is quantum computation and information theory. Quantum computers can in principle solve problems that require an exponentially large amount of resources using traditional computers. In addition, they give rise to fundamental questions about the nature of quantum information that may have application to other fields of physics, most notably quantum gravity and black hole physics. My collaborators and I have recently shown that isolated quantum systems can suffer decoherence due to quantum anomalies. This is a form of instability that arises due to the internal structure of the system under consideration. Quantum anomalies often suggest the presence of hidden degrees of freedom and can render certain systems unsuitable as components for quantum computers. More importantly, we are exploring the exciting possibility that decoherence due to quantum anomalies may help to reveal the nature of the microscopic internal degrees of freedom that account for the thermodynamic properties of black holes.