Event

Recent breakthrough observations of black holes call for a new conceptual framework that unifies their analysis, from gravitational wave production to VLBI imaging of the photon ring. I will show how this is achieved by introducing a novel toolkit that analogizes astrophysical black holes to elementary particles, and allows for a QFT-based reformulation of their dynamics. The toolbox hinges on very recent conceptual understanding of flat holography in spaces that admit black hole `particle' states, and on new integrable structures discovered by studying the self-dual sector. We will outline how this sheds light on fundamental questions including the gravitational S-Matrix, EFTs with higher-spin particles, soft theorems and IR dynamics, conformal hidden symmetries, and a stringy extension thereof known as w_{1+\infty}. Finding a common ground between these allows for exploiting old and new mathematical tools to tackle black holes in the coming years, from twistor theory to machine learning.