Donald Marolf

Biography

Don Marolf recieved his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 1992. His first faculty position was at Syracuse University. He joined the UCSB Physics faculty in 2003, and served as department chair 2016-2018.

Research

Don Marolf studies black holes, gravitational aspects of string theory, and issues associated with gravity, entropy and entanglement. Black Hole information and baby universes form an important part of this work, including refinements of the so-called firewall paradox.
Another sizable component concerns gauge/gravity dualities (e..g, AdS/CFT).

1) How is bulk physics encoded in the gauge theory quantum state? The case of bulk spacetime connectivity (arxiv:1406.2663 and arxiv:1210.3590) is of particular interest.

2) How does the bulk describe thermal transport in the gauge theory?

Other longstanding interests include understanding what is observable in quantum gravity in toy models and effective field theory, gravitational energy, boundary conditions, and quantum fields in curved spacetime.

Selected Publications

Black holes: complementarity or firewalls? A Almheiri, D Marolf, J Polchinski, J Sully, Journal of High Energy Physics 2013 (2), 1-20

An apologia for firewalls, A Almheiri, D Marolf, J Polchinski, D Stanford, J Sully, Journal of High Energy Physics 2013 (9), 1-32 472 2013

The entropy of bulk quantum fields and the entanglement wedge of an evaporating black hole, A Almheiri, N Engelhardt, D Marolf, H Maxfield
Journal of High Energy Physics 2019 (12), 1-47 354 2019

Gauge-gravity duality and the black hole interior, D Marolf, J Polchinski, Physical review letters 111 (17), 171301

Observables in effective gravity, SB Giddings, D Marolf, JB Hartle, Physical Review D 74 (6), 064018

Quantum observables and recollapsing dynamics, D Marolf, Classical and Quantum Gravity 12 (5), 1199

Transcending the ensemble: baby universes, spacetime wormholes, and the order and disorder of black hole information, D Marolf, H Maxfield, Journal of High Energy Physics 2020 (8), 1-72

Observations of Hawking radiation: the Page curve and baby universes, D Marolf, H Maxfield, Journal of High Energy Physics 2021 (4), 1-79

Flat entanglement spectra in fixed-area states of quantum gravity, X Dong, D Harlow, D Marolf, Journal of High Energy Physics 2019 (10), 1-25

One-loop universality of holographic codes, X Dong, D Marolf, Journal of High Energy Physics 2020 (3), 1-39