"Probing Quantum Gravity at All Scales"
MPP Colloquium
- Date: Nov 11, 2025
- Time: 03:00 PM - 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Astrid Eichhorn (Uni Heidelberg)
- Location: MPP Freimann
- Host: MPP
What is the fundamental quantum structure of spacetime? This question
constitutes a persistent challenge in physics and several candidate
theories of quantum gravity have been developed in response to this
challenge. However, experimental tests of these theories are extremely
rare, because the typical scale of quantum gravity, the Planck scale, is
much smaller than distance scales that can be probed experimentally. To
confront quantum theories of gravity with observations, we therefore
require "lever arms" which translate predictions of quantum gravity at
the Planck scale into testable predictions at much larger scales. In
this talk, I will introduce asymptotically safe quantum gravity as an
example for which such a lever arm exists, which is the Renormalization
Group flow of couplings - a "microscope" for quantum field theories,
which enables us to translate Planck-scale predictions to testable
predictions, for instance for properties of elementary particles in the
Standard Model and beyond, for example for dark matter.