Ramanujan Auditorium

QUANTUM BLACK HOLES: An encounter between Hawking and Ramanujan

Atish Dabholkar

ICTP. Trieste

Black Holes are an astonishing prediction of Einstein’s General Relativity with bizarre causal  and quantum properties.  Hawking discovered that in quantum  theory a  Black Hole  is not really black but is slowly emitting radiation. Understanding the implication of Hawking radiation has proved to be  a very valuable guide in our search to unify  General Relativity  with  Quantum Mechanics  and to learn about the  quantum structure of spacetime.   Explorations of quantum black holes in string theory have led to unexpected connections with the mathematical structures created by the great Indian mathematician Ramanujan from a century ago.  In this lecture I will describe the  fascinating history, physics, and mathematics  of quantum black holes.