AdS/CFT and the Weak Cosmic Censorship Conjecture

AdS/CFT 和弱宇宙审查猜想

• 批准号: 2603311
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Cambridge
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2021 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2603311
• 关键词: AdS; CFT; Weak; Cosmic; Censorship

Due to the seminal work of Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking in the seventies, we know that general relativity allows for the formation of singularities from generic initial data. However, little is known about whether these singularities can be observed by distant observers, or whether they are necessarily covered by an event horizon. This is the content of the Weak Cosmic Censorship Conjecture (WCCC), which asserts that event horizons will necessarily cloak singularities. The WCCC in four spacetime dimensions with asymptotically flat boundary conditions has now passed a myriad of scenarios, but remains the most outstanding problem in mathematical general relativity. In spacetime dimensions above or equal to give, however, a mechanism for violations of the WCCC has been found: whenever black hole horizons develop large gradients, and electric fields are absent, they will attempt to break just like a column of fluid. This goes by the name of the Gregory-Laflamme mechanism, named after the two physicists that first envisage this phenomenon. A seemingly unrelated topic is the gauge gravity duality, which posits a complete equivalence between string theory on certain backgrounds and certain quantum field theories living in lower dimensions. While the gravity is dynamical on the string theory side of the duality, it is absent entirely on the quantum field theory side. Since string theory is only consistently formulated in ten (or eleven) dimensions, one might ask whether the Gregory-Laflamme mechanism briefly mentioned above can play a role. Indeed, there is a longstanding scenario where this appears to be the case, but so far all attempts to study this phenomenon from both the quantum field theory side and string theory side have fallen short of an explanation for how or if string theory effects do resolve the singularity. The aim of this project is to simulate numerically, for the very first time, an instance where one can observe the Gregory-Laflamme mechanism on the string theory side of the duality and see what the quantum field theory signature of this phenomenon is. Hopefully, this understanding will allows us to bootstrap our knowledge and provide a singularity resolution purely in terms of quantum field theory data.

由于罗杰·彭罗斯和斯蒂芬·霍金在七十年代的开创性工作，我们知道广义相对论允许从一般的初始数据形成奇点。然而，关于这些奇点是否可以被遥远的观察者观察到，或者它们是否一定被事件视界所覆盖，我们知之甚少。这就是弱宇宙审查猜想(WCCC)的内容，该猜想断言事件视界必然会掩盖奇点。具有渐近平坦边界条件的四个时空维度的WCCC现在已经通过了无数种情景，但仍然是数学广义相对论中最突出的问题。然而，在高于或等于GET的时空维度中，人们发现了一种违反WCCC的机制：每当黑洞视界发展出大的梯度，并且没有电场时，它们就会试图像流体柱一样破裂。这就是格雷戈里-拉夫拉姆机制的名字，以最先设想这一现象的两位物理学家的名字命名。一个看似无关的话题是规范引力对偶，它假定某些背景下的弦理论和某些低维量子场论之间完全等价。虽然引力在二元性的弦理论方面是动态的，但在量子场论方面是完全不存在的。由于弦理论只在十个维度(或十一个维度)上得到了一致的表述，人们可能会问，上面简要提到的格雷戈里-拉夫拉姆机制是否可以发挥作用。事实上，有一种长期存在的情况似乎就是这样，但到目前为止，所有从量子场论和弦理论方面研究这一现象的尝试都没有解释弦理论效应如何或是否确实解决了奇点。这个项目的目的是第一次数值模拟一个实例，在这个实例中，人们可以在对偶的弦理论一侧观察到Gregory-Laflamme机制，并了解这种现象的量子场论特征是什么。希望这种理解将使我们能够引导我们的知识，并提供一个纯粹根据量子场论数据的奇点解决方案。