Peter Millington: Destigmatising modified gravity: extending gravity as a particle physicist

Friday 24 Jun 2022, 12:30 → 14:00 Europe/London

https://zoom.us/j/97041428849

I will give my "hot take" on modified theories of gravity and confess my motivations for studying them.  I will focus on theories in which an additional scalar degree of freedom is coupled directly to curvature terms.  I will argue that the phenomenology of these models is not independent of the structure of the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics and that they share features with other SM extensions.  The extra scalar degree of freedom can mediate a new force that manifests as an effective violation of the universality of free fall.  This "fifth force" can be subject to dynamical screening mechanisms, and its presence can be constrained, e.g., by atom-interferometry experiments.  I will use this example to highlight the various ingredients in the quantum field theory calculations needed to make robust predictions for these models.

 

The seminar will be given in person in Niels Bohr, Schuster. For those connecting remotely please use:

https://zoom.us/j/97041428849

Meeting ID: 970 4142 8849

Passcode: 6275