IAS Quantum Aspects of Black Holes Group Meeting

Abstract: In this talk, I plan to review some recent works on the study of three-dimensional quantum gravity. In the first part, I will focus on pure $AdS_3$ gravity and review the recent results on evaluating the gravity partition function over various 3d geometries (including both on-shell and off-shell contributions), and their implications on holographic $CFT_2$. In the second part, I will extend the discussion to the relation between pure $dS_3$ gravity and SL(2,C) Chern-Simons theory, and show their connections to the double-scaled SYK model. Finally, I will briefly review some developments in $AdS_3$ strings if I have time.