11.05.2021 (Tuesday)

Gravity: The force from the UV

Regular Seminar Simon Caron-Huot (McGill University)

at:
13:30 IC
room zoom 871 9223 5980
abstract:

Does our world respect causality at all energy scales? We explore constraints on low-energy dynamics which step from this assumption. Obstructions to a causal UV completion can be diagnosed using dispersive sum rules, which connect the infrared and ultraviolet. While dispersion relations originate in optics and quantum field theory, I will argue that their true purpose is gravity, where they become particularly powerful due to the maximal growth rate of this force with energy. This leads to the so-called graviton pole in sum rules. I will briefly review how, for non-gravitational low-energy effective theories, causality turns dimensional analysis estimates into sharp numerical bounds, and I will present initial results on gravitational effective theories. [please email a.held@imperial.ac.uk for zoom link or password]