High Energy Theory Seminar

We present a method in 2d CFT for calculating correlators in a state corresponding to the spherical collapse of a shell of matter in three dimensional quantum gravity. In field theory terms, we describe the equilibration process, from early times to thermalization, of a CFT following a sudden injection of energy at time t = 0. Our approach is a continuum generalization of Zamolodchikov's monodromy method for computing conformal blocks at large central charge, and our results are in perfect agreement with previous gravity calculations. We make some comments on information loss.