Event
Primakoff Lecture: "The Entropy of Hawking Radiation"
Juan Maldacena (Institute for Advanced Study)
Black holes are interesting spacetime configurations predicted by general relativity. When quantum mechanics is taken into account, black holes are found to emit thermal radiation, called "Hawking radiation". Recently an interesting area formula for the quantum entropy of black holes was derived. This also leads to a surprising new way to compute the entropy of Hawking radiation. This result indicates that the black hole formation and evaporation is consistent with standard quantum mechanical laws.