Chaos and the Berry curvature of BPS microstates

by Dr Ohad Mamroud (SISSA)

Wednesday 18 Mar 2026, 14:30 → 16:30 Europe/Rome

1/1-2 - Aula "C. Voci" (Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia - Edificio Marzolo)

Holographic theories present a fascinating case where the same physics can be described from two different points of view: either as a (strongly coupled) quantum field theory, or as a theory of quantum gravity. Certain subspaces of the Hilbert space can have very different gravitational descriptions, like those associated with black holes or with horizonless geometries. In the field theory description, it is believed that this distinction is encoded in how chaotic is the subspace, with various ways of defining what we mean by chaos. In this talk, based on ongoing work with Yiming Chen, Sean Colin-Ellerin, and Kyriakos Papadodimas, I will concentrate on the case of degenerate supersymmetric states, where we conjecture that these subspaces can differ in the way they behave under (marginal) deformations of the theory. These deformations map the subspace into itself, inducing a Berry matrix that describes the mixing of these states. For states associated with black holes, the resulting Berry curvature is a strongly chaotic, exhibiting eigenvalue repulsion throughout its spectrum. For states associated with other kinds of geometries, it is not. We support this conjecture by computations in various theories, including super JT gravity, SYK, N=4 super Yang Mills, and the D1-D5 system.