Texts: There is
no textbook for the course. Most material will be drawn from notes and
articles available online. Some possibly useful texts and papers are
gathered below.
Assignments:
There will be sporadic homework assignments.
Student projects:
To get credit for the course every student must complete and write up a
research project, and make an oral presentation. The project can be a
study and report on a topic not covered in class, or an investigation
of an original question conceived by the student, subject to approval
by the instructor. It would be best if the more senior students
get started early on their projects, so that we might in some cases use
their project presentation as part of the regular class time lectures
at an appropriate juncture. We'll probably have a "mini-conference" at
the end of the semester to accomodate the remainder of the student
presentations.
| Topics we will get to: ----------------------------- nature and structure of black holes area theorem laws of black hole mechanics Unruh effect Hawking effect black hole thermodynamics thermal atmosphere, entanglement entropy generalized second law |
Topics we might get to: -------------------------------- Noether charge, generalizations of black hole entropy de Sitter spacetime and Hawking effect Gibbons-Hawking partition function Hawking-Page phase transition in Anti-de Sitter space, AdS/CFT duality Near-extremal D-branes trans-Planckian puzzle |
Tools we will develop: ------------------------------ Carter-Penrose diagrams integration on manifolds vector fields Lie derivatives (differential forms & exterior derivative) quantum field theory in curved spacetime |