3–14 Aug 2026
Europe/London timezone
This is the annual bootstrap conference, which will take place in London during the first two weeks of August 2026

Do We Live on a Rubber Sheet?

11 Aug 2026, 10:00
45m
Lecture Theatre 1 (Blackett Building at Imperial College London)

Lecture Theatre 1

Blackett Building at Imperial College London

Speaker

Denis Karateev

Description

I will discuss whether the rubber-sheet picture of gravity can be made into a consistent quantum field theoretic model. The setup is a vibrating four-dimensional brane embedded in a higher-dimensional flat space-time, with matter confined to the brane. The induced metric is built from the brane fluctuations (phonons), which mediate forces between matter sources. I will explain why the generic force is not Newtonian, how an apparent Einstein-gravity regime could arise at intermediate distances, and how S-matrix bootstrap constraints on phonon scattering strongly constrain this possibility.

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