Masanori Hanada is giving a virtual talk today (Friday 4 March) at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences at the University of Barcelona. The title of his talk is “Black hole geometry from color degrees of freedom“. A link to the seminar page is here. To describe quantum gravity via gauge/gravity duality, it is important to understand how geometry on the gravity side emerges from gauge theory degrees of freedom. The simplest scenario is to identify the eigenvalues of matrix-valued fields with spatial coordinates. For a long time, such a scenario was not pursued because Polchinski raised a puzzling issue in 1998. In this talk, Masanori gave a simple resolution to the puzzle raised by Polchinski, which enables one to use an “eigenvalues = spatial coordinates”-picture to describe the entire bulk geometry. By combining this observation with recent developments on the understanding of the confinement/deconfinement transition, he explained how black hole geometry is encoded into matrix degrees of freedom. The image below comes from the ICCUB website (link here).