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WS22/23 – Abstract
Henry Maxfield
(Stanford University)
1.12.2022
Counting states in quantum gravity with topology change (NO PRETALK)
General relativity has a troubling feature when treated perturbatively as a quantum theory: the Hilbert space has far too many states. This occurs for old black holes, where it leads to the information paradox. Recent results suggest that non-perturbative gravitational effects can ameliorate this problem. Inspired by this, I will discuss a simple model of gravity which includes non-perturbative contributions to the inner product from a sum over the topology of spacetime. This reduces the number of states, which can be counted by an emergent effective description arising from the combinatorics of Young diagrams.
