Related papers: The String Landscape, Black Holes and Gravity as t…
Observations provide increasingly strong evidence that the universe is accelerating. This revolutionary advance in cosmological observations confronts theoretical cosmology with a tremendous challenge, which it has so far failed to meet.…
The virtual black hole phenomenon, which has been observed previously in specific models, is established for generic 2D dilaton gravity theories with scalar matter. The ensuing effective line element can become asymptotically flat only for…
I review the relations between mass scales in various string theories and in M-theory. I discuss physical motivations and possible consistent realizations of large volume compactifications and low string scale. Large longitudinal…
Motivated by the early discovery of the gigantic landscape of string theory vacua, in recent years people switched direction to try to find constraints on low energy effective field theories from UV-complete descriptions for example quantum…
Scalar-tensor theories of gravity generally violate the strong equivalence principle, namely compact objects have a suppressed coupling to the scalar force, causing them to fall slower. A black hole is the extreme example where such a…
I describe our understanding of physics near the planck length, in particular the great progress of the last four years in string theory. Superstring theory, and a recent extension called M theory, are leading candidates for a quantum…
The transition between (non supersymmetric) quantum string states and Schwarzschild black holes is discussed. This transition occurs when the string coupling $g^2$ (which determines Newton's constant) increases beyond a certain critical…
The Beckenstein-Hawking black hole entropy in string theory and its extensions, as expressed in terms of charges that correspond to central extensions of the supersymmetry algebra, has more symmetries than U-duality. It is invariant under…
String theory tells us that quantum gravity has a dual description as a field theory (without gravity). We use the field theory dual to ask what happens to an object as it falls into the simplest black hole: the 2-charge extremal hole. In…
In this talk I review recent developments in superstring theory. In the first half of the talk I discuss some of the earlier developments in this subject. This includes a review of the status of string theory as a unified theory of gravity…
A model of spontaneous Lorentz violation in four dimension is given, which seems to provide a Lorentz invariant effective theory. An SU(2) Yang-Mills gauge field and an auxiliary U(1) vector field generate gravity and other interactions…
We observe that the existence of black holes limits the extent to which M Theory (or indeed any quantum theory of gravity) can be described by conventional quantum mechanics. Although there is no contradiction with the fundamental…
The observation of a scalar resonance at the LHC, compatible with perturbative electroweak symmetry breaking, reinforces the Standard Model parameterisation of all subatomic data. The logarithmic evolution of the SM gauge and matter…
The aim of these lectures is to give an introduction to several topics which lie at the intersection of string theory, gravity theory and gravity phenomenology. One successively reviews: (i) the "membrane" approach to the dissipative…
I review several different calculations, coming from string theory, nonperturbative quantum gravity and analyses of black holes that lead to predictions of phenomena that would uniquely be signatures of quantum gravitational effects. These…
We argue that the light particles in string theory obey an effective quantum mechanics modified by the inclusion of a quantum-gravitational friction term, induced by unavoidable couplings to unobserved massive string states in the…
The cosmological constant problem is turned around to argue for a new foundational physics postulate underlying a consistent quantum theory of gravity and matter, such as string theory. This postulate is a quantum equivalence principle…
We argue for a relation between the supersymmetry breaking scale and the measured value of the dark energy density $\Lambda$. We derive it by combining two quantum gravity consistency swampland constraints, which tie the dark energy density…
In these lectures we review the quantum physics of large Schwarzschild black holes. Hawking's information paradox, the theory of the stretched horizon and the principle of black hole complementarity are covered. We then discuss how the…
We look at the various aspects of treating general relativity as a quantum theory. It is briefly studied how to consistently quantize general relativity as an effective field theory. A key achievement here is the long-range low-energy…