Manus Visser (U. of Cambridge), Partition function for a volume of space

Tuesday 21 Feb 2023, 14:00 → 15:30 Europe/Stockholm

Albano 3: 6228 - Mega (22 seats) (Albano Building 3)

In their seminal 1977 paper, Gibbons and Hawking applied concepts of quantum statistical mechanics to ensembles containing black holes, finding that a semiclassical saddle point approximation to the partition function recovers the laws of black hole thermodynamics. I will generalise the Gibbons-Hawking method to find the approximate partition function of a ball of space at any fixed proper volume. The result is the exponential of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of its boundary, indicating the holographic nature of nonperturbative quantum gravity in generic finite volumes of space.