Talks

Galaxy mergers are a standard aspect of galaxy formation and evolution, and most (likely all) large galaxies contain supermassive black holes. As part of the merging process, the supermassive black holes should in-spiral together and eventually merge, generating both continuous gravitational waves and a background of gravitational radiation in the nanohertz to microhertz regime.  An array of precisely timed pulsars spread across the sky can form a galactic-scale gravitational wave detector in the nanohertz band. I describe the current efforts to develop and extend the pulsar timing array concept, together with recent limits which have emerged from international efforts to constrain astrophysical phenomena at the heart of supermassive black hole mergers.

The spectral action functional of noncommutative geometry provides a model of Euclidean (modified) gravity, possibly coupled to matter. The terms in the large energy asymptotic expansion of the spectral action can be computed via pseudodifferential calculus. In the case of highly symmetric spacetimes, like Robertson-Walker metrics and Bianchi IX gravitational instantons, there is a richer arithmetic structure in the spectral action, and the terms in the asymptotic expansion are expressiblein terms of periods of motives and of modular forms. This reveals a new occurrence of interesting periods and motives in high-energy physics.

In this talk, I will discuss the asymptotic safety paradigm, and will highlight that it can provide a framework for a predictive ultraviolet completion for gravity and matter. Specifically, I will discuss compelling hints that exist for the realization of asymptotic safety in pure gravity, and will then present recent progress on the case of gravity coupled to Standard Model matter. In particular, I will highlight results that show how to forge a link between physics at the Planck scale and physics at the electroweak scale, in order to impose observational constraints on the microscopic quantum gravity dynamics.