HEP/Astro Seminar -- Wednesday, 15 November 2000

Supersymmetric conical defects -- Towards a string theoretic description of black hole formation

Vijay Balasubramanian, (Penn)

Abstract

Is quantum unitarity lost in the Hawking evaporation of black holes formed by collision of particles in a pure state? This long-standing question may be simply studied in the context of three dimensional gravity with a negative cosmological constant -- in this theory, black holes can form by collision of conical defects (so-called "point particles"). I will show how a large class of three dimensional, supersymmetric conical defects can be realized as dimensional reductions of non-singular solutions to the chiral, N=4, 6-dimensional supergravity. This theory has a dual description in terms of a bound state of D1 and D5 branes compactified on K3. I will discuss how the point particles appear as states in this dual theory, and how the process of collision to form black holes can be modelled.

References

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"Simplifying algebra in Feynman graphs, Part 1: Spinors," G. Chalmers, W. Siegel (SUNY, Stony Brook), Phys. Rev. D59 045012, 1999, hep-ph/9708251

"The selfdual sector of QCD amplitudes," G. Chalmers, W. Siegel (SUNY, Stony Brook), Phys. Rev. D54 7628-7633, 1996, hep-th/9606061

"One loop N gluon amplitutes with maximal helicity violation via colinear limits," Zvi Bern, Gordon Chalmers (UCLA), Lance Dixon (SLAC), David A. Kosower (Saclay), Phys. Rev. Lett. 72 2134-2137, 1994, hep-ph/9312333

3:30pm, Smith Lab 4079