Talks

I will discuss the Vainshtein mechanism in massive gravity. I will show that the spherically symmetric backgrounds that were believed to have superluminal sound speed are in fact unstable. Instead, there is a new class of phenomenologically relevant solutions with stable and subluminal perturbations.

In General Relativity, gravitons propagate to null directions, because of its well-organized structures. Modifying the gravity theory slightly, meanwhile, the beautiful structure is broken and gravitons can easily propagate superluminaly. Here, applying the characteristic method, which is the well-established powerful way to analyze causal structures, the causal structures in Massive gravity and Gauss-Bonnet gravity are analyzed. We discuss the superluminality, acausality and black holes.

Modern physics rests on two basic frameworks, quantum theory and general relativity. Quantum gravity aims to unify these two frameworks into one consistent theory. One can expect that such a formulation delivers in particular a novel understanding of space and time as quantum objects.

I will give an introduction to some basic concepts in quantum gravity research and present possible models of quantum space time.