The 2024 Oskar Klein Memorial Lecture will be given by Renata E. Kallosh in the Oskar Klein Auditorium, AlbaNova. The lecture is sponsored by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences through its Nobel Institute for Physics, and by Stockholm University.

Title: Attractors in Black Holes and Cosmology

Abstract: The concept of attractors, well-known in classical mechanics, proved very productive in the theory of black holes and inflationary cosmology. I will start with attractors in supersymmetric black holes and discuss how the discovery of Kaluza-Klein black hole attractors helped recently to explain the mysterious cancellation of ultraviolet divergences in 82 Feynman diagrams in 4-loop superamplitude in N=5 supergravity.

I will also describe inflationary alpha-attractors. This large class of inflationary models gives predictions that are stable with respect to even very significant modifications of inflationary potentials. These predictions match all presently available CMB-related cosmological data. Some of these models have a Kaluza-Klein origin and provide targets for the future satellite mission LiteBIRD, which will attempt to detect primordial gravitational waves. I will show that potentials in some of the recent advanced versions of cosmological attractors have a beautiful fractal landscape structure.