Physics Colloquium: “Bootstrapping Quantum Gravity: Black Holes, Wormholes and Quantum Chaos”

The Syracuse University Department of Physics is pleased to welcome Scott Collier, a senior post-doctoral research associate in the Center for Theoretical Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for his talk titled, “Bootstrapping quantum gravity: black holes, wormholes, and quantum chaos.”

Scott Collier is a senior postdoctoral associate in the Center for Theoretical Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Prior to joining MIT, he was an associate research scholar in the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science (PCTS) at Princeton University from 2020 – 2023. In 2022-23, he held the Sam B. Treiman fellowship at PCTS. He earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 2020 from Harvard University at the Center for the Fundamental Laws of Nature. Collier’s research focuses on fundamental questions in quantum gravity and quantum aspects of black hole physics through the lens of holographic dualities. His work develops non-perturbative tools for the study of strongly-interacting quantum chaotic systems and applies them to delineate the space of consistent theories of quantum gravity through holography. His recent work has focused on the construction of multiple new solvable holographic dualities between theories of quantum gravity and quantum systems, which serve as controllable theoretical laboratories for foundational problems in quantum gravity.

Abstract: Quantum mechanics and general relativity are foundations of contemporary theoretical physics. The former addresses the question of the basic constituents of matter and their interactions, while the latter entwines the gravitational dynamics of matter with the geometry of spacetime itself. But what are the fundamental constituents of spacetime?

Holographic duality provides an exact definition of quantum gravity in terms of an ordinary strongly-coupled quantum system in one fewer dimension. In this paradigm, spacetime emerges from underlying quantum degrees of freedom as an effective description at low energies. In this talk, Collier will describe how the conformal bootstrap, which is a set of ideas and techniques for constraining strongly-coupled quantum field theories, opens a non-perturbative window into quantum aspects of black holes and quantum cosmology. He will review recent advances in the exploration of low-dimensional models of quantum gravity, where bootstrap techniques are most powerful. These provide controlled settings where holographic dualities may be derived and understood in complete detail, shedding light on the inner workings of quantum gravity. We will see that Euclidean wormholes in gravity (higher topology solutions of Einstein’s equations) provide a statistical accounting of black hole microstates and a coarse-grained picture of the space of chaotic conformal field theories, leading to a fascinating interplay between the conformal bootstrap and quantum chaos. He will conclude by explaining the microscopic realization of one of the simplest models of quantum gravity in an expanding universe in terms of a double-scaled matrix model, leading to a surprising new role for random matrix theory in quantum cosmology.