Speaker: Arjun Kar, University of British Columbia
Abstract: I will present a "minimal" model of black hole evaporation which uses replica wormholes and the island formula to recover the unitary Page curve. This model combines advantageous features of previous models of evaporation to give a more flexible formalism. As an example of its flexibility, I will discuss its application to de Sitter black holes, where the island formula yields results which seem to be in tension with some old expectations about quantum gravity in de Sitter space. Finally, time permitting, I will describe more general implications of wormholes in the gravitational path integral by extending a toy model of Marolf and Maxfield to include spin structure. The inclusion of spin structure presents interesting complications when constructing the baby universe Hilbert space, as well as the dual of a single boundary theory.