Prof. Xavier Calmet 

Bio: Professor Calmet has been at Sussex since 2009. After graduating from the University of Karlsruhe in 1999, he moved to the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich where he obtained his Ph.D. in 2002. He was then a postdoctoral scholar successively at the California Institute of Technology, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Free University of Brussels, the University of Oregon and the Catholic University of Louvain before settling down at the University of Sussex. He works on Classical and Quantum Gravity (including quantum effects in black holes and in the early universe) and on Quantum Sensors for Fundamental Physics. He is a member of the QSNET collaboration.

Calmet has made a number of important contributions to noncommutative gauge theories, unified theories and to the study of the stability of fundamental constants. He has proven the existence of a minimal length in nature using quantum metrology arguments as well as tools from black hole physics. Since arriving at Sussex, his research interests have shifted towards quantum gravity and quantum effects in black holes and other astrophysical objects as well as in the early universe. He has further developed effective field theory methods which enable model independent calculations in quantum gravity. 

In collaboration with scientists from the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), Calmet has developed a new theoretical framework to probe generic new physics with clocks which they have validated using NPL data.

Calmet has obtained important results on the thermodynamics of black holes showing that black holes do not only have a temperature but also a quantum pressure. He has shown that singularities theorems as well as Birkhoff theorem do not hold in quantum gravity. Furthermore, he has proven that the no hair theorem does not hold in quantum gravity leading to the notion of quantum hair. The quantum hair offers a new solution to the famous Hawking information paradox and enables to understand for the first time how information is encoded into Hawking radiation leading to a unitary evaporation of black holes.

Publications:

e-print from inspire                                                               

e-print from arXiv.org                                                           

or from google scholar.

Editorial work:

I am a founding member of the editorial board of the series SpringerBriefs in Physics and since 2013 a member of the advisory board of Foundations in Physics.