Topical review: Alessia Platania

Wednesday 23 Nov 2022, 11:00 → 12:30 Europe/Stockholm

Non-perturbative strings, asymptotic safety, and the swampland

Quantum gravity is undoubtfully one of the most important missing pieces in the understanding of the mathematical structure of our universe.

The impossibility of straightforwardly quantizing gravity via perturbative quantum field theory has led to a plethora of different proposals, from asymptotically safe gravity to non-local gravity, loop quantum gravity, and string theory. Different approaches have different problems and have succeeded in different areas. Yet, on the conceptual side, it is not obvious that all these frameworks are inequivalent or unrelated: some theories may be low-energy approximations of others, or could even provide different mathematical descriptions of the same physics. On the technical side, the knowledge gained in an approach could be useful to better investigate others. 

In this spirit, I will review recent progress in connecting two theories: asymptotically safe gravity and string theory. Specifically, I will discuss how to test certain aspects of asymptotic safety using stringy swampland constraints, and how techniques developed in the context of asymptotically safe gravity can be used to compute cosmological higher-derivative corrections to all orders in string theory.

My seminar is based on: 2101.02226, 2103.06276, 2107.06897.