Colloquium

Hubeny identified a scenario in which a charged particle falling toward a near-extreme Reissner-Nordstrom black hole can penetrate the black hole and drive it beyond the extremal limit, thereby giving rise to an apparent violation of cosmic censorship. A version of this scenario, relevant to a Kerr black hole and involving a particle with orbital and/or spin angular momentum, was recently examined by Jacobson and Sotiriou (following up on earlier work by Hod); here also the black hole is driven beyond the extremal limit.

The quantum mechanical state vector is a complicated object. In particular, the amount of data that must be given in order to specify the state vector (even approximately) increases exponentially with the number of quantum systems. Does this mean that the universe is, in some sense, exponentially complicated? I argue that the answer is yes, if the state vector is a one-to-one description of some part of physical reality. This is the case according to both the Everett and Bohm interpretations.

I will discuss the growth of entanglement under a quantum quench at point contacts of simple fractional quantum Hall fluids and its relation with the measurement of local observables. Recently Klich and Levitov recently proposed that, for a free fermion system, the noise generated from a local quantum quench provides a measure of the entanglement entropy. In this work, I will examine the validity of this proposal in the context of a strongly interacting system, the Laughlin FQH states.

Conformal Field Theory is the language in which we often think about strong dynamics, be that in Condensed Matter, Quantum Gravity, or Beyond the Standard Model Physics. AdS/CFT led to significant advances of our understanding. What should come next?