Presented by: Luca Iliesiu
University of California, Berkeley

Wednesday, June 18th, 2025
7:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

Duane Physics and Astrophysics Building, room G1B20

2000 Colorado Ave,
Boulder, CO 80309

Price: free

Abstract: Black holes are often portrayed as cosmic vacuum cleaners that swallow everything, even light. In reality, they are far richer and more revealing: each black hole is a natural laboratory where the two great pillars of modern physics — Einstein’s general relativity and quantum mechanics — meet head-on. In this talk, we will venture from the known, the black holes that we can observe in our sky, into the unknown, where we begin to understand how black holes obey the rules of quantum mechanics. No math background is needed — just curiosity about how the darkest objects in the cosmos shed light on some of the deepest questions in physics.

About the speaker: Luca Iliesiu received his BA in Physics from Princeton University in 2015. He remained there for his PhD, which he received in 2020. He was then appointed as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, where he was part of the Simons Ultra Quantum Matter Collaboration, before becoming faculty at Berkeley in 2024. Iliesiu has a broad set of interests in quantum field theory, quantum gravity, and their relation to particle and condensed matter physics.  On the gravity side, he seeks to understand how gravitational objects, such as black holes, obey the rules of quantum mechanics. On the quantum field theory side, he is interested in understanding the space of such theories using analytic and numerical constraints. Recent research highlights include resolving the longstanding problem of the breakdown of thermodynamics for low-temperature black holes, recovering the integer degeneracy of supersymmetric black hole microstates by solely using the gravitational path integral, or understanding how global symmetries are violated in quantum gravity due to non-perturbative effects.