String Theory seminar - Philip Szepietowski Seminar

Denef, Hartnoll and Sachdev (DHS) provided a beautiful expression for the one-loop determinant of an operator in a black hole background in terms of the associated quasinormal mode (QNM) frequencies. Several checks of this proposal have been performed in the literature for cases where the full QNM spectrum is known analytically. However, in many interesting cases (such as asymptotically AdS black holes in dimensions greater than three) the QNM frequencies are only known numerically -- with analytic results known only in various limiting approximations. In this talk I will discuss work in progress towards applying the formalism of DHS to situations where the QNM spectrum is not fully known analytically and will describe a proposed procedure for computing such one-loop determinants numerically.