Please join us for a seminar by Luca Victor Iliesiu of Stanford Univeristy.

Zoom link:    https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/371632 Passcode: 123456

Title: Universality: from many-body quantum systems to black holes

Abstract: Universality classes are at the heart of theoretical physics. They explain why systems with drastically different microscopic descriptions oftentimes share the same behavior. In this talk, I will focus on the role of universality in many-body quantum systems and black holes. In the first part of the talk, I will discuss how conformal field theories can describe a variety of statistical and quantum phase transitions. Next, I shall explain how, in conformal theories, constraints from symmetry, unitarity, and mathematical self-consistency are frequently powerful enough to determine the behavior of strongly-coupled quantum systems undergoing such transitions. In the latter part of the talk, I will discuss how conformal symmetry plays a crucial role in understanding the quantum nature of one of the most widely discussed black hole solutions, the extremal black hole. Our new understanding of the quantum gravity corrections that these black holes experience, resolves a series of puzzles that have plagued the field of black hole thermodynamics for the past decades and explains why such black holes have universality classes of their own.