Talks

I will describe work aimed at understanding the dynamics of gravitational collapse in a fully quantum setting. Its emphasis is on the role played by fundamental discreteness. The approach used suggests modifications of a black hole\'s mass loss rate and thermodynamical properties. Numerical simulations of collapse with quantum gravity corrections indicate that black holes form with a mass gap.

This will be an introductory talk about Topological Quantum Computation. TQC is attractive because it is intrinsicaly decoherence free. We introduce the basic notions, such as non abelian anyons, quantum symmetries and topological order. A topologically ordered phase is a gapped phase in which the basic degrees of freedom are of a topological nature (denoted as anyons), charactetized by their fusion and braiding properties. If time permits possible implementations based on Quantum Hall systems will be discussed as well.

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If large extra dimensions exist, microscopic black holes may be created in TeV particle colliders and in Earth\'s atmosphere by the collisions of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays with atmospheric nuclei. The decay of these black holes could soon be observed at the Large Hadron Collider or the Pierre Auger Observatory. Monte Carlo codes have been developed to simulate these events. In this talk I will introduce two of these codes (CATFISH for the LHC and GROKE for the PAO), and discuss how mini black holes can be distinguished from standard model or susy events.

This talk will review proposed tests of ideas about quantum gravity, including searches for quantum decoherence, probes of the possible energy-dependence of the velocity of light, and the nature of vacuum energy. Motivations will be drawn from a non-critical string theory framework.

I\'ll give a broad review of various ways of looking for large, small, and warped extra dimensions and will give only a brief review of the black-hole business, particularly an introduction based on the original paper we wrote and recent work on Randall-Sundrum black holes.

I will discuss a new method of inflaton potential reconstruction that combines the flow formalism, which is a stochastic method of inflationary model generation, with an exact numerical calculation of the mode equations of quantum fluctuations. This technique allows one to explore regions of the inflationary parameter space yielding spectra that are not well parameterized as power-laws. We use this method to generate an ensemble of generalized spectral shapes that provide equally good fits to current CMB and LSS as data as do simpler power-law spectra. Within this ensemble are spectra that exhibit a strong running on large angular scales (where cosmic variance is large) that turns off on small scales. Such strongly running spectra are accompanied by large tensor components that lie outside the 1 and 2 sigma limits of current WMAP3 and SDSS data. This demonstrates that the generalization of the spectral shape adversely impacts our ability to constrain key inflationary observables. The inflationary models giving rise to such spectra are characterized by an initially fast rolling inflaton, in marked contrast to the dominant paradigm of slow roll inflation.

Observables in (quantum) General Relativity can be constructed from (quantum) reference frame -- a physical observable is then a relation between a system of interest and the reference frame. A possible interpretation of DSR can be derived from the notion of deformed reference frame (cf Liberati-Sonego-Visser). We present a toy model and study an example of such quantum relational observables. We show how the intrinsic quantum nature of the reference frame naturally leads to a deformation of the symmetries, comforting DSR to be a good candidate to describe the QG semi-classical regime.

The talk gives a brief overview over different versions of doubly or deformed special relativity (DSR) and its motivation, which comes from the occurrence of a fundamental invariant length in quantum gravity (QG). Despite its QG origin, DSR is a modification of flat space geometry without explicit notion of gravity. In the literature there is a considerable amount of work done to probe deformations of special relativity in classical and quantum mechanics and quantum field theory without taking into account intermediate steps between QG and flat space, like general relativity or quantum field theory in curved space. The more special part of this contribution makes one step into this gap by comparing the DSR modifications of simple quantum scattering of a particle in flat space with the modifications caused by a weak classical gravitational field.

Effective field theories (EFTs) have been widely used as a framework in order to place constraints on the Planck suppressed Lorentz violations predicted by various models of quantum gravity. There are however technical problems in the EFT framework when it comes to ensuring that small Lorentz violations remain small -- this is the essence of the \'naturalness\' problem. Herein we present an \'emergent\' space-time model, based on the \'analogue gravity\'\' programme, by investigating a specific condensed-matter system that is in principle capable of simulating the salient features of an EFT framework with Lorentz violations. Specifically, we consider the class of two-component BECs subject to laser-induced transitions between the components, and we show that this model is an example for Lorentz invariance violation due to ultraviolet physics. Furthermore our model explicitly avoids the \'naturalness problem\', and makes specific suggestions regarding how to construct a physically reasonable quantum gravity phenomenology.

The dispersion relations that naturally arise in the known emergent/analogue spacetimes typically violate analogue Lorentz invariance at high energy, but do not do so in completely arbitrary manner. This suggests that a search for arbitrary violations of Lorentz invariance is possibly overkill: There are a number of natural and physically well-motivated restrictions one can put on emergent/analogue dispersion relations, considerably reducing the plausible parameter space.