Research in theoretical particle physics.
The main lines characterizing the research to be performed during my internship are as follows:
- Attractors, AdS/CFT and Freudenthal Duality
- Black Holes, Quantum Entanglement and Non-Linear Symmetries
Since the seminal papers by Ferrara, Gibbons, Kallosh and Strominger in the 90's, the Attractor Mechanism has been one of the "hot" topics investigated within the high-energy theoretical physics community. Such a mechanism governs the dynamics of the stabilization of scalar degrees of freedom (moduli) in the near-horizon geometry of black hole solutions to the Einstein gravity equations, and it is crucial for the consistency of the microscopic interpretation of the black hole entropy, as a function purely of the conserved charges of the system.
Attractor Mechanism also characterizes black p-branes, appearing in the spectrum of higher-dimensional theories, and giving rise to complicated intersecting geometries.
Black holes and black p-branes, especially in the context of gauged supergravity theories, provide an important testground to address fundamental questions of gravity, both at the classical and quantum level. In gauged supergravity, the solutions typically have Anti de Sitter (AdS) asymptotics, and one can exploit their properties to investigate issues within the so-called AdS/CFT correspondence, especially in condensed matter physics, where asymptotically non-flat black holes provide the dual description of certain systems at finite temperature.
In particular, multi-centered black hole systems in asymptotically AdS space-times has become an important issue in the high-energy theoretical physics community, especially in relation to the application of holographic techniques in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence and in relation to the physics of glasses.
Within this framework, of utmost interest is Freudenthal duality, which can be defined as an anti-involutive, non-linear map acting on symplectic spaces. One of the main objectives of my research program during the internship is to unravel novel aspects of Freudenthal duality in black hole systems (also in the multi-centered ones, in relation to the aforementioned "horizontal" symmetry), e.g. by the exploitation of group-theoretical techniques, based on invariant polynomials and the so-called "groups of type E7", in order to characterize the complicated dynamics of these systems, unraveling deep connections between the theory of complexity, differential geometry, and group theory.
The role of quantum information and entanglement started to become intriguingly relevant in the quest for a theory of QG a few years ago, when a stunning similarity between the mathematical structures describing the entropy of black holes in supergravity/string theory and the measure of quantum entanglement in Quantum Information Theory (QIT) has been discovered.
A very interesting task is to unravel the meaning and implementation of Freudenthal duality, originally discovered within black hole systems in (super)gravity, within the dual QIT picture.
The above research proposal, to be pursued during the internship at the Physics Department of the University of Murcia, and hosted by the research group led by Prof. Emilio Torrent-Lujan, presents an high degree of innovation and inter-disciplinarity, as it lies at the boundary of high-energy physics and QIT.
This research framework is widely investigated at international level, and the above considerations place the study of the black hole/qu-bit correspondence and of non-linear symmetries such as Freudenthal duality at the cutting edge of international research, making it a substantial contribution to the internationalization of the research being pursued by the host team led by Prof. Torrente-Lujan at the Physics Dept. of the University of Murcia.