Speaker
Description
Recent developments in quantum gravity have emphasized the role of an "observer" in making sense of quasi-local quantum-gravitational effects. In this talk, we will describe an explicit model of a gravitationally dressed observer in Jackiw-Teitelboim (JT) gravity. This is a dilaton gravity model in two spacetime dimensions that is fully solvable both classically and quantum-mechanically, thereby allowing us to study quantum gravity effects far beyond the semiclassical regime. We will show how properly accounting for gravitational dressing in JT gravity affects the experience of a local probe crossing the horizon of a black hole, and also study nonperturbative effects on the thermal atmosphere outside the black hole in this model. In particular, we will see that quantum-gravitational effects can allow a particle detector to sense the location of a black hole horizon locally, unlike in semiclassical gravity, and also that nonperturbative effects lead to an explicitly finite entanglement entropy for matter fields in the exterior of a black hole.