Research

In my PhD, I focused on the black hole information problem, and how methods from boundary conformal field theory can help us solve it. For a short technical overview, see my thesis proposal. For a slightly longer technical overview, see my thesis.

Selected papers

  1. Looking for (and not finding) a bulk brane (2021). Wyatt Reeves, Moshe Rozali, Petar Simidzija, James Sully, Christopher Waddell, DW. arXiv: 2108.10345.
  2. Holographic BCFTs and communicating black holes (2021). Hao Geng, Severin Lüst, Rashmish K. Mishra, DW. CQG, 38:154004. arXiv: 2104.07039.
  3. Quantum tasks require islands on the brane (2021). Alex May, DW. CQG, 38:144001. arXiv: 2102.01810.
  4. BCFT entanglement entropy at large central charge and the black hole interior (2020). James Sully, Mark Van Raamsdonk, DW. JHEP, 2021:167. arXiv: 2004.13088.
  5. Eigenstate thermalization and disorder averaging in gravity (2020). Jason Pollack, Moshe Rozali, James Sully, DW. PRL, 125:021601. arXiv: 2002.02971.
  6. Information radiation in BCFT models of black holes (2019). Moshe Rozali, James Sully, Mark Van Raamsdonk, Christopher Waddell, DW. JHEP, 2020:4. arXiv: 1910.12836.
  7. Black hole microstate cosmology (2018). Sean Cooper, Moshe Rozali, Brian Swingle, Mark Van Raamsdonk, Christopher Waddell, DW. JHEP, 2019:65. arXiv: 1810.10601.

Miscellaneous notes/talks

  • Maxwell’s demon goes to Vegas (2020). Can demons playing thermodynamic slot machines violate the second law, i.e. make free energy for free? Yes! Showing this involves some neat results from the theory of martingales.
  • MIP* = RE (2020). Consulting entangled provers makes you a god, in the sense that they can quickly and reliably convince you of “yes” answers to the Halting Problem. This tells us something deep about the nature of entanglement and operator algebras.
  • Sphere packing and the modular bootstrap (2019). Surprisingly, throwing balls in a box constrains the lightest black holes in certain theories of quantum gravity. The connection is linear programming!
  • Chaos and thermalisation (2018). In quantum mechanics, “chaotic” can mean either “looks random” or “spreads quickly”. A brief introduction to both notions.
  • String perturbation theory and Riemann surfaces (2018). To paraphrase Mark Kac, propagating strings hear the shape of every Riemann surface. I explain what this means in terms of the path integral and moduli space of a string loop amplitude.
  • The inflationary spectrum (2016). If you want phenomenological constraints for your crazy pet GUT, you could do worse than go outside with a microwave camera and look at the night sky. Seminar talk on perturbations in cosmological inflation.