Physics 776---Advanced Gravitation Theory---Spring 2005

Black Hole Thermodynamics

Instructor: Prof. Ted Jacobson
Room 4115, 301-405-6020, jacobson@physics.umd.edu

Meeting time: TuTh 11-12:15
Place: Room 4208

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:
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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:
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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:
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Carter-Penrose diagrams
integration on manifolds
vector fields
Lie derivatives
(differential forms & exterior derivative)
quantum field theory in curved spacetime