HET BROWN BAG SEMINAR | Drama From Strings

I will discuss both published and upcoming work by Silverstein and myself on violations of the equivalence principle (or "drama") near black hole horizons in string theory. In particular, we are interested in the longitudinal spreading effect first derived by Susskind. I will review the heuristic derivation of this effect, and then explain how to extract the longitudinal spreading scale from a gauge-invariant six point function in flat spacetime. I will then describe the implications of this effect on the infalling observer and Hawking quanta, and speculate on applications to the information paradox and AdS/CFT.