Philosophy of Black Holes Workshop

It is known that all wormholes violate classical energy conditions, non-negativity constraints on contractions of the stress-energy tensor. Since these conditions are violated by quantum fields, it was believed that wormholes can be constructed in the context of semiclassical gravity. But negative energies in quantum field theory are not without restriction: quantum energy inequalities (QEIs) control renormalized negative energies averaged over a geodesic. Thus, QEIs provide restrictions on the construction of wormholes. First, I will briefly discuss both ‘short’ and ‘long’ (without causality violations) wormhole solutions in the context of semiclassical gravity. Then I will present constraints on the Maldacena, Milekhin and Popov ‘long’ wormhole from the smeared and the doubled smeared null energy condition.

Hawking's discovery that black holes radiate has led to the black hole information paradox: a puzzle that has fascinated theoretical physicists for many years. Although some aspects of the paradox have been resolved through the help of holography and AdS/CFT, other aspects are still unclear. I will review the paradox and talk about how randomness can be of aid in deepening our understanding of the black hole information paradox.