The Black Hole information problem: past, present, and future

We give a brief overview of the black hole information problem emphasizing fundamental issues and recent proposals for its resolution. The focus is on broad perspective and providing a guide to current literature rather than presenting full details. We concentrate on resolutions restoring naive unitarity.Comment: Key Issues Review for Reports on Progress of Physics, 20 pages, minor change

Group Averaging and Refined Algebraic Quantization

We review the framework of Refined Algebraic Quantization and the method of Group Averaging for quantizing systems with first-class constraints. Aspects and results concerning the generality, limitations, and uniqueness of these methods are discussed.Comment: 4 pages, LaTeX 2.09 using espcrc2.sty. To appear in the proceedings of the third "Meeting on Constrained Dynamics and Quantum Gravity", Nucl. Phys. B (Proc. Suppl.

Some brane theoretic no-hair results (and their field theory duals)

This contribution to the proceedings of the 1999 Canadian Conference on General Relativity and Relativistic Astrophysics is a brief exposition of earlier work, with Sumati Surya (hep-th/9805121) Amanda Peet (hep-th/9903213), addressing certain results in higher dimensional supergravity that are related to black hole no-hair theorems. Its purpose is to describe, in language appropriate for an audience of relativists, how these results can be related to the Maldacena conjecture (aka, the AdS/CFT correspondence). The end product may be taken as a new kind of quantitative evidence in support of the Maldacena conjecture.Comment: 5 pages, 2 pictex figures included, for the proceedings of the 1999 Canadian Conference on General Relativity and Relativistic Astrophysic

Asymptotic Symmetries from finite boxes

It is natural to regulate an infinite-sized system by imposing a boundary condition at finite distance, placing the system in a "box." This breaks symmetries, though the breaking is small when the box is large. One should thus be able to obtain the asymptotic symmetries of the infinite system by studying regulated systems. We provide concrete examples in the context of Einstein-Hilbert gravity (with negative or zero cosmological constant) by showing in 4 or more dimensions how the Anti-de Sitter and Poincar\'e asymptotic symmetries can be extracted from gravity in a spherical box with Dirichlet boundary conditions. In 2+1 dimensions we obtain the full double-Virasoro algebra of asymptotic symmetries for AdS$_3$ and, correspondingly, the full Bondi-Metzner-Sachs (BMS) algebra for asymptotically flat space. In higher dimensions, a related approach may continue to be useful for constructing a good asymptotically flat phase space with BMS asymptotic symmetries.Comment: 13 pages, no figure