Title: Modern approaches to quantum gravity via bottom-up methods

Speaker: Dr. Pratik Rath, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Abstract: A lot of recent progress in our understanding of quantum gravity has been made by
exploiting two key bottom-up themes – quantum information and the gravitational path
integral. Toy models of quantum gravity such as random tensor networks and two dimensional
Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity play an important role in bringing these two themes together. In this
talk, I will review the progress made in understanding quantum gravity using these tools, which
illustrates how spacetime emerges as an effective thermodynamic description of the underlying
fundamental theory of quantum gravity.