Projects

General Relativity (GR) is broadly accepted as the correct description of the gravitational interaction when the curvature of spacetime is relatively low, but modifications of this theory are expected to arise at high energies. In an effective-field-theory approach, such modifications can be captured by introducing higher-curvature corrections in the Einstein's field equations. There has been a great interest in the literature in order to ...

Some of the most outstanding problems in modern theoretical high energy physics are related to the puzzles arising in the physics of black holes. More than 40 years ago Bekenstein and Hawking discovered that black holes have an entropy proportional to the area of their horizon. A major theoretical challenge is to account for the microstates responsible for this entropy. String theory is a leading theory of ...

Black holes are the inevitable endpoints of gravitational collapse of matter with sufficient mass. They are ubiquitous in our own Universe.
Hawking famously showed that black holes carry entropy proportional to their horizon area, meaning that they hold a large number of microscopic states. To do so, he relied on a semi-classical approximation, where he assumed that quantum fields fluctuate around a fixed classical black hole ...

Recent advances in quantum gravity challenge the classical viewpoint that black hole horizons shroud their inner structure. However, there is no consensus on the scale of possible quantum corrections to classical General Relativity. This undermines the scientific potential to probe quantum gravity of current large observational programs. With this project, I will develop quantum gravity models of black holes and their astrophysical ...

As a quantum theory of gravity, string theory is expected to answer many outstanding questions regarding the intersection of Einstein's classical gravitational theory with the quantum field theory of the Large Hadron Collider.  A few of these questions are: the black hole "information paradox"; the cosmological constant; and the holographic nature of gauge theories.

The information paradox relates to the entropy of black holes ...

Gravitational waves are gravity's messenger - propagating ripples in the fabric of space and time generated by the motion of large masses, such as black holes, and indeed by the evolution of the universe itself. Gravitational waves are very faint but extremely clean signals of some of the most mysterious and distant processes in our universe. Our first direct detection of gravitational waves earlier this year thus opens up an exciting new era ...

In the past several years there have been rapid advances in our understanding of black hole physics in string theory driven by new developments in quantum field theory and the AdS/CFT (or holographic) correspondence. A central role in these developments is played by new calculational techniques both on the quantum field theory and the gravitational sides of the correspondence. My research group has contributed important and foundational ...

Two of the most important outstanding problems in fundamental physics are describing the dynamics of strongly interacting quantum field theories (QFTs) and understanding the mysteries of black hole physics and quantum gravity. These two puzzles are deeply connected through the  holographic correspondence, which relates the physics of quantum gravity to that of QFT in one less dimension. Studying this duality in detail enhances our ...