9 papers
Negative energies and the breakdown of bulk geometry
John Preskill, Mykhaylo Usatyuk, Shreya Vardhan
One central question in quantum gravity is to understand how and why predictions from semiclassical gravity can break down in regimes with low spacetime curvature. One diagnostic o…
ADE Minimal Strings and Multi-Matrix Duals
Victor A. Rodriguez, Mykhaylo Usatyuk, Zi-Yue Wang
We revisit ADE minimal string theories, focusing on the D- and E-series minimal models coupled to Liouville theory. Unlike the A-series, whose duals are solvable two-matrix models,…
God of the Gaps: Random matrix models and the black hole spectral gap
Clifford V. Johnson, Mykhaylo Usatyuk
We show that random matrix models are a natural tool for understanding the appearance of a large gap in the microstate spectrum of black holes when there is a high degeneracy of st…
The evaporation of black holes in supergravity
Guanda Lin, Luca V. Iliesiu, Mykhaylo Usatyuk
In supergravity, charged rotating black holes are generically driven towards becoming extremal and supersymmetric through the emission of Hawking radiation. Eventually, as the blac…
Closed universes, factorization, and ensemble averaging
Mykhaylo Usatyuk, Ying Zhao
We study closed universes in holographic theories of quantum gravity. We argue that within any fixed theory, factorization implies there is one unique closed universe state. The wa…
Quantum mechanics and observers for gravity in a closed universe
Daniel Harlow, Mykhaylo Usatyuk, Ying Zhao
Recent arguments based on the quantum extremal surface formula or the gravitational path integral have given fairly compelling evidence that the Hilbert space of quantum gravity in…