The Black Hole Information Paradox in the Age of Holographic Entanglement Entropy

ABSTRACT
The black hole information paradox — whether information escapes an evaporating black hole or not — remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of theoretical physics. The apparent conflict between validity of semiclassical gravity at low energies and unitarity of quantum mechanics has long been expected to find its resolution in the deep quantum gravity regime. Recent developments in the holographic dictionary and in particular its application to entanglement, however, have shown that a semiclassical analysis of gravitational physics has a hallmark feature of unitary evolution. I will describe this recent progress and discuss some potential new avenues for working towards a resolution of the information paradox.
BIO
Netta Engelhardt is Assistant Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 2019. Prior to that, she worked as postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, after having obtained her PhD at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2016. Her research focuses on understanding the dynamics of black holes in quantum gravity, gaining insights from the interplay between gravity and quantum information via the AdS/CFT correspondence. She is the 2019 winner of the Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists, and one of the 2021 winners of the New Horizons in Physics Prize “for calculating the quantum information content of a black hole and its radiation".

Q&A