Douglas Stanford, Associate Professor of Physics, Stanford University
Theoretical black holes exhibit some aspects of many-body quantum chaos in a simple way. They provide a type of solvable model that has led to a better general understanding of many-body quantum chaos.
However, there are aspects of quantum chaos that are not so easy to see in the black hole setting. In particular, a quantum chaotic theory should exhibit random matrix statistics in the spectrum of its energy eigenvalues, and this isn't easy to see for a black hole.
This talk will review the relationship between black holes and chaos, and describe an attempt to obtain random matrix statistics using small corrections to the thermodynamics of a black hole. These corrections are associated to wormhole geometries in Euclidean-signature spacetime.