On the Phases of Gravity

SPEAKER: Professor Eliezer Rabinovici  

We are delighted to welcome Professor Rabinovici as a guest speaker. Rabinovici’s research is in theoretical quantum field theory and string theory. The latter explores the phases of gauge theory and gravity, including the physics of black holes and singularities. Matter has many phases all the way from liquids and solids to topological ones. The standard model consists of three phases of gauge theories manifesting themselves as the electromagnetic interactions, the weak and the colored ones.

In this seminar some of the possible phases of gravity will be described. This will be done by identifying the relevant degrees of freedom at different energy scales. In this context relations between the properties of the long time behavior of correlation functions in quantum field theory and the so called black hole information paradox will be examined. The consequences of scale invariance on the vaccum energy will be reviewed. 

Professor Rabinovici is Chair of the Israeli Committee for High Energy Physics and of SESAME, the Synchrotron-Light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East, of which he is also a founder. He has also directed the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University and has chaired the Racah Institute of Physics.

Eliezer Rabinovici is Professor of Physics, holding the Leon H. and Ada G. Miller Chair of Science at the Racah Institute of Physics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He received there his BSc (1969) and MSc degrees (1971). He completed his PhD at the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1974. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Fermilab (1975-1976) and at Lawrence Berkeley Lab (1977). He has been at the Hebrew University since 1978 as Senior Lecturer, Associate Professor (1981) and Professor (1985).