Probing Black Hole Singularities with Holography

Nejc Čeplak (Trinity College Dublin)

Time:

2PM Wednesday, 25 March 2026

Location:

Science East, E0.32

How can one probe the region of spacetime near black hole singularities? Since these singularities are conjectured to lie behind event horizons, they cannot be accessed directly. Can their signatures nevertheless be extracted by observers far from the black hole?

Holography, the conjectured equivalence between theories of gravity in anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime and conformal field theories living on its boundary, offers a new window into this problem. In holographic theories, information about the black hole interior is encoded in correlation functions of the dual field theory, and singularities leave distinct imprints on these observables. These signatures can be understood in terms of bouncing geodesics: null geodesics that originate on one boundary of an eternal AdS black hole, reflect off the curvature singularity, and return to the opposite asymptotic boundary.

In this talk, I will review bouncing geodesics in both neutral (Schwarzschild-AdS) and electrically charged (Reissner-Nordström-AdS) black holes, where the singularity is spacelike and timelike, respectively. I will show how the information carried by these geodesics is encoded in holographic correlation functions, and demonstrate that their analytic structure provides a concrete probe of the near-singularity geometry. This framework offers a new route to studying quantum gravitational effects expected to become important near black hole singularities.