Lecturer: Dr. Adam Brown
Affiliation: Stanford University
Abstract:
There are a number of important thought
experiments that involve raising and
lowering boxes full of radiation in the
vicinity of black hole horizons. My talk will
look at the limitations placed on these
thought experiments by the null energy
condition, which imposes a fundamental
bound on the tensile-strength-to-weight
ratio of the materials involved, makes it
impossible to build a box near the horizon
that is wider than a single wavelength of
the Hawking quanta and puts a severe
constraint on the operation of 'space
elevators' near black holes. In particular,
proposals for 'mining' black holes by
lowering boxes near the horizon,
collecting some Hawking radiation and
dragging it out to infinity cannot proceed
nearly as rapidly as has previously been
claimed.
Additional details of the upcoming Joint Seminars
in Theoretical High Energy Physics can be found
on the following link.