Projects

The spectacular first direct detections of gravitational waves (GW) have opened up hitherto unexplored and extreme regions of the universe. To realize the rich discovery potential of GWs with laser interferometry will require new collaborations and initiatives at the interface of physics and engineering. With this Declaration of Intent our research groups join forces to put forward a coherent research program building on our strengths and ...

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 ...

Current observations suggest that our universe is asymptoting towards a de Sitter space with a small amount of vacuum energy. From a quantum field theory perspective, this smallness presents a perplexing puzzle –the cosmological constant problem– and it is the hope that a theory of quantum gravity, such as string theory, provides an opportunity to address it. However, the status of our universe in string theory is not yet clear and it appears ...

Understanding quantum gravity is one of the most important unsolved problems in high energy theoretical physics. The past six years have seen remarkable progress in this field in terms of exactly solvable holographic lower dimensional models, starting with the SYK model and 2d JT gravity. In this project, we aim to understand this class of solvable models better, with two goals in mind. Firstly, we want to characterize how large ...

String theory offers a unique window into quantum gravity since it is a model in which gravity is quantized without encountering any of the usual difficulties in more standard approaches, like quantum field theory. Even more it offers a method to explicitly understand the UV completion of general field theories coupled to gravity and one of the main lessons learned so far is that string theory only allows specific field theories coupled to ...

We investigate the implementation of the quantum mechanical canonical formalism to general realtivity. An important breaktrough came with Astekars new variables, from which an appropriate quantum Hilbert space was derived. This lead to predictions involving discrete area and volume measurements. Recent research is concerned with the classical limit, the Hamiltonian constraint, applications to cosmology, U+2026