4th workshop: Directions in quantum gravity

January 13 - 14, 2021

In the fourth installment of our workshop series, we focused on a broad range of approaches to quantum gravity. We explored directions in AdS/CFT, asymptotically safe gravity, the amplitudes program and the effective-field theory approach, supergravity, causal sets and the link from quantum gravity to network science.

This broad collection of topics was meant to stimulate discussions between approaches and to inspire thinking about novel (and potentially surprising) connections.

As a novelty, the workshop featured parts specifically aimed at PhD students, such as a PhD forum with introductory talks into selected topics of the workshop, as well as the opportunity to get to know other PhD students within the broad area of quantum gravity.

Speakers included

• Ginestra Bianconi (Queen Mary University of London) - Emergent simplicial geometry

• Niels-Emil Bjerrum Bohr (NBI, University of Copenhagen) - (Quantum) Gravity as an Effective Field Theory, Amplitudes Techniques and Black Hole Scattering

• Alejandra Castro (University of Amsterdam) - The Spectrum of Near-Extremal Rotating Black Holes

• Henrik Johansson (Uppsala University) - The Double Copy Program: Perturbative Quantum Gravity from Gauge Theory

• Max Niedermaier (University of Pittsburgh) - Ostrogradsky Instability: a No-Go for Quantum No-Gos

• Kasia Rejzner (University of York) - Algebraic QFT on causal sets

• Chris Ripken (University of Mainz) - Quantum Gravity scattering amplitudes from the quantum effective action

• Carlo Trugenberger (SwissScientific Technologies) - Combinatorial quantum gravity: geometry from random graphs

For the PhD forum, speakers were

• Ian Jubb (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies)

• Marc Schiffer (Heidelberg University)

• Mariana Carrillo Gonzalez (Imperial College)