Field Theories of Gravity, Cosmology and Black Holes
Our collaboration focuses on topics where both gravity and quantum physics are relevant, ranging from the investigation of the gravitational interaction at the fundamental level, to the study of black hole physics and cosmological models. Issues of the largest impact are the understanding of black hole formation and Hawking evaporation, and cosmological inflation as the standard paradigm of the early universe, dark energy and dark matter. Beside the well established formalism of quantum field theory (QFT) in curved space-times, which still provides us with a very powerful tool for studying quantum effects in semiclassical gravity, today’s novelty is the possibility to formulate theoretical descriptions for the fully quantum regime of gravity, and in forms which can lead to concrete predictions for astrophysics and cosmology. This is attained by employing advanced quantum field theory methods, like effective actions in the renormalisation group approach to high-energy regimes and string inspired generalised uncertainty principles, along with corpuscular models of specific self-gravitating systems.
