Applied Physics/Physics Colloquium: Alexander Maloney - " Wormholes and the Conformal Bootstrap"

Abstract: A wormhole is a geometry which connects two widely separated regions of space-time.  Wormholes are ubiquitous in many theories of gravity, but remain poorly understood.  However, we can study them using the "AdS/CFT correspondence," which relates theories of quantum gravity to conformal field theories (CFTs) in one less dimension.  These CFTs are similar to the gauge theories which describe the fundamental forces of particle physics, as well as to those which describe important statistical and condensed matter systems at criticality.  I will describe a simple setup where we can understand the effects of wormholes precisely, using a set of strongly coupled techniques known as the conformal bootstrap.  We will conclude that Einstein gravity is described by to a “disorder averaged” quantum theory, much like a spin glass or other system with quantum chaos. The upshot is this: in a theory of gravity with wormholes, the coupling constants of nature look like random variables. 
 

Alexander Maloney is a theoretical physicist working on problems in quantum field theory and quantum gravity. His primary interests include questions related to the quantum structure of space-time, and in particular the entropy and thermodynamics of black holes. He has made important contributions to the study of conformal field theories, particularly those in two dimensions, and in the interplay between the dynamics of strongly coupled field theories and theories of gravity. He has played an important role in the use of quantum information theoretic methods in quantum field theories and quantum gravity. Maloney received a B.Sc. in physics and an M.Sc. in mathematics from Stanford University in 1998, and a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University in 2003. This was followed by postdoctoral positions at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He joined the faculty of McGill University in 2007, where he was a James McGill professor and Sir William Macdonald Chair in Physics. In 2024 he moved to Syracuse University, where is the Kathy and Stan Walters Endowed Professor of Quantum Science and director of the Institute for Quantum and Information Sciences