Conveners
Session 1
- Jean Alexandre (King's College London)
We show that quantum gravity does exist as a genuine perturbative quantum field theory (i.e. is renormalizable), with all the correct properties one would expect of such a theory: unitarity, locality, microcausality etc. However it has many novel features not seen in other quantum field theories.
Although it is perturbative in couplings it is non-perturbative in Planck's constant, and the...
The laws of physics should not depend on how we choose to describe them, and we should not be able to change the physical predictions of our theory just by changing notation. However, this is exactly what happens in the standard formulation of quantum field theories. The effective action receives different quantum corrections depending on how we parametrise our fields. Even Feynman diagrams,...
Understanding the laws of inflation can shed light on the processes that govern physics at very high energy scales, beyond current experimental limits. In particular, the characterisation and detection of primordial gravitational waves produced during inflation can be an excellent test for the particle content of the very early universe. We consider an Effective Field Theory of inflation...
In this talk, I will discuss the geometry of attractor theories in a cosmological context, showing that theories which feature poles act as unions of multiple canonical models. This means that poles demarcate different field-space domains which may drastically differ in their phenomenology. Usually, studies of attractor theories are confined within the poles; however, moving beyond the poles...
