Related papers: Schr\"odinger's Black Hole Cat
General relativity successfully describes space-times at scales that we can observe and probe today, but it cannot be complete as a consequence of singularity theorems. For a long time there have been indications that quantum gravity will…
It is univocally anticipated that in a theory of quantum gravity, there exist quantum superpositions of semiclassical states of spacetime geometry. Such states could arise for example, from a source mass in a superposition of spatial…
We describe a theory amalgamating quantum theory and general relativity through the identification of a continuous 4-dimensional spacetime arena constructed from the substructures of a generalised multi-dimensional form for proper time. In…
Investigating quantum gravity requires a comprehension of both, general relativity and quantum field theory. Therefore this thesis starts, after a general introduction to the treated topics, with a brief review of the field theoretical…
We introduce a method to compute particle detector transition probability in spacetime regions of general curved spacetimes provided that the curvature is not above a maximum threshold. In particular we use this method to compare the…
We argue that the conventional quantum field theory in curved spacetime has a grave drawback: The canonical commutation relations for quantum fields and conjugate momenta do not hold. Thus the conventional theory should be denounced and the…
We consider a possibility to construct a quantum-mechanical model of spacetime, where Planck size quantum black holes act as the fundamental constituents of space and time. Spacetime is assumed to be a graph, where black holes lie on the…
The physical interpretation and eventual fate of gravitational singularities in a theory surpassing classical general relativity are puzzling questions that have generated a great deal of interest among various quantum gravity approaches.…
The problem of finding the quantum theory of the gravitational field, and thus understanding what is quantum spacetime, is still open. One of the most active of the current approaches is loop quantum gravity. Loop quantum gravity is a…
A universal prediction of quantum gravity is that the dynamics of general relativity is augmented by interactions that are of higher order in the spacetime curvature. Numerical explorations indicate that such terms may have a drastic impact…
The prediction of spacetime singularities, regions of infinite curvature where classical physics breaks down, is one of the most profound challenges in General Relativity (GR). In particular, black hole solutions such as the Schwarzschild…
Stationary compact astrophysical objects such as black holes and neutron stars behave as classical systems from the gravitational point of view. Their (observable) curvature is everywhere "small". Here we investigate whether mergers of such…
It is congruous with the quantum nature of the world to view the space-time geometry as an emergent structure that shows classical features only at some observational level. One can thus conceive the space-time manifold as a purely…
These lectures discuss an S-matrix approach to quantum gravity, and its relation to more local spacetime approaches. Prominent among the problems of quantum gravity are those of unitarity and observables. In a unitary theory with solutions…
There ought to exist a reformulation of quantum theory which does not depend on classical time. To achieve such a reformulation, we introduce the concept of an atom of space-time-matter (STM). An STM atom is a classical non-commutative…
We consider relativistic quantum field theory in the presence of an external electric potential in a general curved space-time geometry. We utilise Fermi coordinates adapted to the time-like geodesic to describe the low-energy physics in…
We derive the gravitational field and the spacetime metric generated by sources in quantum superposition of different locations. We start by working in a Newtonian approximation, in which the effective gravitational potential is computed as…
Consistency between quantum mechanical and general relativistic views of the world is a longstanding problem, which becomes particularly prominent in black hole physics. We develop a coherent picture addressing this issue by studying the…
Spacetime wormholes are evidently an essential component of the construction of a time machine. Within the context of general relativity, such objects require, for their formation, exotic matter -- matter that violates at least one of the…
We calculate the response of an Unruh--DeWitt detector in a 2+1d spacetime that contains a BTZ black hole in a superposition of locations. Upon performing a Quantum Reference Frame (QRF) transformation, this can also be seen as a detector…