Seminars & Colloquia

Postponed until 10/2

Andreas Ross, Yale University

Effective field theories yield a systematic and efficient treatment of multi scale problems. This talk will focus on effective field theories for black holes in higher dimensional spacetimes with a compact dimension. In such spacetimes a phase transition between a black hole and a black string occurs making these systems an interesting toy model to study topology changes in higher dimensional gravity. We will describe how to set up the effective field theory for such Kaluza-Klein black holes and use it to compute their thermodynamic properties. In particular we include charged black holes and study the effect of charge on the thermodynamics, and we consider finite size effects which describe the tidal deformation of the black hole horizon. Another gravitational system where effective field theories are very useful is the compact binary system. Gravitational waves from compact binary inspirals are an important signal expected to be detected at experiments such as LIGO. If time permits I will sketch the effective field theory setup for binaries and summarize recent progress in precision gravity calculations for gravitational wave phenomenology.