Despite its undeniable success, there are evidences that the Standard Model cannot be the fundamental theory of electromagnetic, weak and strong interactions. The search for a theory beyond the Standard Model is deeply connected to another fundamental question in theoretical physics, namely understanding the structure of quantum gravity. Whatever effective theory might describe particle interactions beyond the observable energy scale must eventually be completed into quantum gravity. Recently, a lot of activity has been devoted to determine criteria which differentiate between effective low-energy field theories that can be consistently coupled to quantum gravity from theories that, even if they seem to be consistent, cannot. In the current jargon, the former are said to be in the `Landscape’ while the latter form the so-called `Swampland’. A number of such criteria, or Swampland Conjectures, have been proposed in the literature and attracted considerable interest in the high energy physics community. The Swampland Conjectures have profound implications for many open issues in physics and cosmology, such as the structure of large field inflation in early-time cosmology, or the mechanism responsible for the observed late-time acceleration of the universe, to name some of the most striking examples. It is therefore extremely important and timely to put such conjectures on firmer grounds.
A concrete and particularly well developed framework to address specific questions of quantum gravity is String Theory, where the Swampland conjectures translate into conjectures regarding the structure of possible string geometries. Recent work has shown that these geometries have an elegant reformulation in terms of a generalized version of Riemannian geometry. The goal of this workshop is to explore the intriguing connections between general properties of quantum gravity and the generalized geometry of string theory. The workshop aims to bring together the swampland community and the generalized geometry community at this unique time in which our understanding of the Swampland is quickly evolving.
The Banff International Research Station will host the “Gravitational Emergence in AdS/CFT” workshop in Banff from October 24 to October 29, 2021.
An outstanding problem of modern physics is the reconciliation of the two most successful broad theories of physics: general relativity, which describes the gravitational force exerted by massive objects in terms of the bending and rippling of spacetime, and quantum mechanics, which describes the behavior of matter on the minute scales of subatomic particles such as electrons. While both theories are remarkably successful independently, they appear to give contradictory predictions of phenomena that involve gravity at the small scales at which quantum mechanics is relevant. Such phenomena include the Big Bang, when the universe was small enough to be described by quantum mechanics and sufficiently dense to also require a gravitational description; also the process of the final stages of the death of a large star, when a black hole is formed and the star’s matter is concentrated in an extremely small volume. A proper description of these phenomena requires a unified theory of quantum gravity.
A particular model of quantum gravity, and the one on which this workshop focuses, works to understand an idealized situation in which gravity essentially lives “in a box”. It is a remarkable property of quantum gravity that the behavior of gravity inside the box, including quantum effects, can be described purely by the physics on the surface of the box. Importantly, because the surface of the box is rigid, no gravity is needed in describing its physics: hence the remarkable feature of this model is that quantum gravitational physics can actually be described without apparently using any gravity at all! Answering questions like what happened in the Big Bang or what happens inside black holes then amounts to rephrasing what’s happening on the boundary of the box, which we understand well, in the gravitational language of the inside. This rephrasing is called bulk reconstruction, and is the focus of this workshop.
The 29th International Symposium on Lepton Photon Interactions at High Energies follows the tradition of a long series of high-energy physics conferences. The program features plenary sessions covering topics of major interest to the particle physics community. New this year will be two (or three) tracks of parallel sessions for one day, that will provide an opportunity for additional presenters to give a more in-depth presentation of individual physics results. We will also organise poster sessions where additional researchers may present their work.
