Related papers: Are accelerated detectors sensitive to Planck scal…
We examine an Unruh-DeWitt particle detector which couples linearly to the scalar density of a massless Dirac field on the static cylindrical quotient of the (1+1)-dimensional Minkowski spacetime, allowing the detector's motion to remain…
Scale dependence of fundamental physical parameters is a generic feature of ordinary quantum field theory. When applied to gravity, this idea produces effective actions generically containing a running Newtonian coupling constant, from…
We investigate the back-action from a spatially pointlike particle detector on a quantum scalar field, as characterised by the expectation value of the field's stress-energy tensor, without conditioning on a measurement of the detector.…
Large-scale bulk peculiar motions introduce a characteristic length scale, inside which the local kinematics are dominated by peculiar-velocity perturbations rather than by the background Hubble expansion. Regions smaller than the…
We analyse the response of an arbitrarily-accelerated Unruh-DeWitt detector coupled to a massless scalar field in Minkowski spacetimes of dimensions up to six, working within first-order perturbation theory and assuming a smooth switch-on…
Cauchy horizons are well known to exhibit instabilities in classical spacetime dynamics and singularities in quantum field theory. We analyse the response of an Unruh-DeWitt particle detector that falls towards a Cauchy horizon, in terms of…
We study quantum-gravitational signatures at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in the context of theories with extra spatial dimensions and a low fundamental Planck scale in the TeV range. Implications of a gravitational fixed point at high…
A Planck-scale minimal observable length appears in many approaches to quantum gravity. It is sometimes argued that this minimal length might conflict with Lorentz invariance, because a boosted observer could see the minimal length further…
In this note I introduce the notion of the ``reliability horizon'' for semi-classical quantum gravity. This reliability horizon is an attempt to quantify the extent to which we should trust semi-classical quantum gravity, and to get a…
Over the last few years the study of possible Planck-scale departures from classical Lorentz symmetry has been one of the most active areas of quantum-gravity research. We now have a satisfactory description of the fate of Lorentz symmetry…
"Doubly-special relativity" (DSR), the idea of a Planck-scale Minkowski limit that is still a relativistic theory, but with both the Planck scale and the speed-of-light scale as nontrivial relativistic invariants, was proposed…
We investigate the potential of observations of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and large-scale structure in the Universe to detect possible modifications of standard inflationary models by physics beyond the Planck…
The phenomenologically observed flatness - or near flatness - of spacetime cannot be understood as emerging from continuum Planck (or sub-Planck) scales using known physics. Using dimensional arguments it is demonstrated that any…
This letter explores how a reinterpretation of the generalized uncertainty principle as an effective variation of Planck's constant provides a physical explanation for a number of fundamental quantities and couplings. In this context, a…
After a brief review of the first phase of development of Quantum-Gravity Phenomenology, I argue that this research line is now ready to enter a more advanced phase: while at first it was legitimate to resort to heuristic order-of-magnitude…
String theory suggests the existence of a minimum length scale. An exciting quantum mechanical implication of this feature is a modification of the uncertainty principle. In contrast to the conventional approach, this generalised…
It is possible that there may be differences in the fundamental physical parameters from one side of the observed universe to the other. I show that the cosmological constant is likely to be the most sensitive of the physical parameters to…
An assessment is made of recent attempts to evaluate how quantum gravity may affect the anisotropy spectrum of the cosmic microwave background. A perturbative scheme for the solution of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation has been found to allow…
We study semi-classical particle production in non-singular bouncing cosmologies by employing the Unruh-DeWitt model of a particle detector propagating in this class of spacetimes. The scale factor for the bouncing cosmology is derived…
The Planck scale is usually believed to be an unpassable wall. Putting a cutoff there and thinking of it as a quantized spacetime entity shows that. However, this is exactly the cause of many problems in quantum gravity. The cosmological…