High Energy Theory Seminar

If entanglement builds spacetime, then conversely, disentanglement ought to destroy spacetime. From the quantum null energy condition and quantum focusing conjecture, we obtain disentanglement criteria which necessitate infinite energies and strong spacetime singularities. We apply our results to the strong cosmic censorship proposal, where strong singularities at the Cauchy horizons in black holes are desirable. Using our disentanglement criteria and without resorting to any detailed calculations, we provide an exceedingly general and physically transparent discussion of strong cosmic censorship in semiclassical black holes. We argue that strong cosmic censorship is enforced in asymptotically flat and de Sitter black holes by disentanglement across putative Cauchy horizons and describe how similar disentanglement might be avoided in some anti-de Sitter cases. Time-permitting, we will end by calculating mutual information in two-dimensional CFTs to explicitly verify some of our intuition, about the (dis)entanglement carried by quantum fields, used in our more general argument.

The talk is in 469 Lauritsen.

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