International Journal of Modern Physics D

The epoch of Cosmic Dawn, when the first stars and galaxies were born, is widely considered as the final frontier of observational cosmology today. Mapping the period between Cosmic Dawn and the present-day provides access to more than 90% of the baryonic (normal) matter in the universe, and unlocks several thousand times more Fourier modes of information than available in today’s cosmological surveys. We review the progress in modeling baryonic gas observations as tracers of the cosmological large-scale structure from Cosmic Dawn to the present day. We illustrate how the description of dark matter haloes can be extended to describe baryonic gas abundances and clustering. This innovative approach allows us to fully utilize our current knowledge of astrophysics to constrain cosmological parameters from future observations. Combined with the information content of multi-messenger probes, this will also elucidate the properties of the first supermassive black holes at Cosmic Dawn. We present a host of fascinating implications for constraining physics beyond the $\mathrm{\Lambda }$CDM model, including tests of the theories of inflation and the cosmological principle, the effects of nonstandard dark matter, and possible deviations from Einstein’s general relativity on the largest scales.

The quantum gravity vacuum must contain virtual fluctuations of black hole microstates. These extended-sized fluctuations get “crushed” when a closed trapped surface forms, and turn into on-shell “fuzzball” states that resolve the information puzzle. We argue that these same fluctuations can get “stretched” by the anti-trapped surfaces in an expanding cosmology, and that this stretching generates vacuum energy. The stretching happens when the Hubble deceleration reduces quickly, which happens whenever the pressure drops quickly. We thus get an inflation-scale vacuum energy when the heavy GUTS particles become nonrelativistic, and again a small vacuum energy when the radiation phase turns to dust. The expansion law in the radiation phase does not allow stretching, in agreement with the observed irrelevance of vacuum energy in that phase.

Quantum gravity effects are traditionally tied to short distances and high energies. In this essay, we argue that, perhaps surprisingly, quantum gravity may have important consequences for the phenomenology of the infrared. We center our discussion around a conception of quantum gravity involving a notion of quantum spacetime that arises in metastring theory. This theory allows for an evolution of a cosmological Universe in which string-dual degrees of freedom decouple as the Universe ages. Importantly, such an implementation of quantum gravity allows for the inclusion of a fundamental length scale without introducing the fundamental breaking of Lorentz symmetry. The mechanism seems to have potential for an entirely novel source for dark matter/energy. The simplest observational consequences of this scenario may very well be residual infrared modifications that emerge through the evolution of the Universe.

A long march of 50 years of successive theoretical progress and new physics discovered using observations of gamma-ray bursts has finally led to the formulation of an efficient mechanism able to extract the rotational energy of a Kerr black hole to power these most energetic astrophysical sources and active galactic nuclei. We here present the salient features of this long-sought mechanism, based on gravito-electrodynamics, and which represents an authentic shift of paradigm of black holes as forever “alive” astrophysical objects.

The gravitational dynamics of the coarse-grained spacetime geometry should emerge from extremizing the number of microscopic configurations, $\mathrm{\Omega }$, of the pre-geometric variables corresponding to a given geometry. This $\mathrm{\Omega }$ will be the product over all events ${𝒫}$ of the density, $\rho ({𝒫})$, of microscopic configurations associated with each event ${𝒫}$. I show how $\rho$ can be computed, in terms of the van Vleck determinant, and thus obtain directly the gravitational effective action ${{ℒ}}_E$ at mesoscopic scales. The leading term of this, nonperturbative, effective action gives the Einstein–Hilbert action, thereby providing its microscopic derivation. The higher-order corrections are finite without any need for regularization and I demonstrate how they can be computed in a systematic manner.

We discuss a recent proposal that the Euclidean gravity approach to quantum gravity is correct if and only if the theory is holographic, providing several examples and general arguments to support the conjecture. This provides a natural mechanism for the low-energy gravitational effective field theory to access a host of deep ultraviolet properties, like the Bekenstein–Hawking entropy of black holes, the unitarity of black hole evaporation, and the lack of exact global symmetries.

We show that an S-brane which arises in the inside of the black hole horizon when the Weyl curvature reaches the string scale induces a continuous transition between the inside of the black hole and the beginning of a new universe. This provides a simultaneous resolution of both the black hole and Big Bang singularities. In this context, the black hole information loss problem is also naturally resolved.

In this paper, I propose a model to describe the birth of the universe taking into account back reaction effects produced by the inflaton field fluctuations, with self-interactions included. These fluctuations $\delta \phi =\phi (x)-〈\phi 〉$ would have been very important at the Planck scales and their self-interactions could have been the fuel to the primordial expansion of the universe.

A very simple and physical derivation of the conservation equation for the propagation of gravitational radiation is presented. The formulation is exact. The result takes the readily recognisable and intuitive form of a Poynting-style equation, in which the outward propagation of stress energy is directly related to the volumetric equivalent of a radiation reaction force acting back upon the sources, including the purely gravitational contribution to the sources. Upon averaging, the emergent pseudo tensor for the gravitational radiation is in exact agreement with that found by much more labour-intensive methods.

In this essay, we show that quantum gravity and the spin-statistics theorem have very interesting consequences for dark matter candidates. Quantum gravity can lead to fifth force type interactions that lead to a lower bound on the masses of bosonic candidates. In the case of fermions, the spin-statistics theorem leads to a lower bound on fermion masses. For both bosonic and fermionic dark matter candidates, quantum gravity leads to a decay of dark matter particles. A comparison of their lifetime with the age of the universe leads to an upper bound on their masses. For singlet scalar dark matter fields, we find $10^{-3}\mathrm{\text{eV}}\lesssim m\lesssim 10^7\mathrm{\text{eV}}$.

It is proved that the Hawking emission spectrum of a semiclassical Schwarzschild black hole of mass $M$ has a sharp cut at the frequency scale ${\omega }_{\mathrm{\text{max}}}={(\hslash M)}^{-\frac{1}{3}}$. In particular, taking into account the nonlinear gravitational coupling between the tunneled Hawking quanta and the emitting black hole, it is explicitly shown that the upper bound $\omega <{\omega }_{\mathrm{\text{max}}}$ on the energies of the emitted Hawking quanta is a direct consequence of the famous Thorne hoop relation.

The dark matter problem is one of the most pressing problems in modern physics. As there is no well-established claim from a direct detection experiment supporting the existence of the illusive dark matter that has been postulated to explain the flat rotation curves of galaxies, and since the whole issue of an alternative theory of gravity remains controversial, it may be worth to reconsider the familiar ground of general relativity (GR) itself for a possible way out.

It has recently been discovered that a skew-symmetric rank-three tensor field — the Lanczos tensor field — that generates the Weyl tensor differentially, provides a proper relativistic analogue of the Newtonian gravitational force. By taking account of its conformal invariance, the Lanczos tensor leads to a modified acceleration law which can explain, within the framework of GR itself, the flat rotation curves of galaxies without the need for any dark matter whatsoever.

Roger Penrose’s 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics recognizes that his identification of the concepts of “gravitational singularity” and an “incomplete, inextendible, null geodesic” is physically very important. The existence of an incomplete, inextendible, null geodesic does not say much, however, if anything, about curvature divergence, nor is it a helpful definition for performing actual calculations. Physicists have long sought for a coordinate independent method of defining where a singularity is located, given an incomplete, inextendible, null geodesic, that also allows for standard analytic techniques to be implemented. In this essay, we present a solution to this issue. It is now possible to give a concrete relationship between an incomplete, inextendible, null geodesic and a gravitational singularity, and to study any possible curvature divergence using standard techniques.

Galaxies are huge physical systems having dimensions of many tens of thousands of light years. Thus any change at the galactic center will be noticed at the rim only tens of thousands of years later. Those retardation effects seem to be neglected in present day galactic modeling used to calculate rotational velocities of matter in the rims of the galaxy. The significant differences between the predictions of Newtonian theory and observed velocities are usually explained by either assuming dark matter or by modifying the laws of gravity (MOND). In this essay, we will show that taking retardation effects into account one can explain the azimuthal velocities of galactic matter and the well known Tully–Fisher relations of galaxies.

In both Newtonian gravity and Einstein gravity there is no force on a test particle located inside a spherical cavity cut out of a static, spherically symmetric mass distribution. Inside the cavity exterior matter is decoupled and there is no external field effect that could act on the test particle. However, for potentials other than the Newtonian potential or for geometries other than Ricci flat ones this is no longer the case, and there then is an external field effect. We explore this possibility in various alternate gravity scenarios, and suggest that such (Machian) external field effects can serve as a diagnostic for gravitational theory.

There must exist a reformulation of quantum field theory which does not refer to classical time. We propose a pre-quantum, pre-spacetime theory, which is a matrix-valued Lagrangian dynamics for gravity, Yang–Mills fields, and fermions. The definition of spin in this theory leads us to an eight-dimensional octonionic spacetime. The algebra of the octonions reveals the standard model; model parameters are determined by roots of the cubic characteristic equation of the exceptional Jordan algebra. We derive the asymptotic low-energy value 1/137 of the fine structure constant, and predict the existence of universally interacting spin one Lorentz bosons, which replace the hypothesised graviton. Gravity is not to be quantized, but is an emergent four-dimensional classical phenomenon, precipitated by the spontaneous localisation of highly entangled fermions.

The response of a gravitating object to an external tidal field is encoded in its Love numbers, which identically vanish for classical black holes (BHs). Here we show, using standard time-independent quantum perturbation theory, that for a quantum BH, generically, the Love numbers are nonvanishing and negative. We calculate the quadrupolar electric quantum Love number of slowly rotating BHs and show that it depends most strongly on the first excited level of the quantum BH. Finally, we discuss the detectability of the quadrupolar quantum Love number in future precision gravitational-wave observations and show that, under favourable circumstances, its magnitude is large enough to imprint an observable signature on the gravitational waves emitted during the inspiral. Phase of two moderately spinning BHs.

The existence of a fundamental scale is expected to be a key feature of quantum gravity. Many approaches take this property as a starting assumption. Here, instead, we take a less conventional viewpoint based on a critical inspection of both fundamental principles and kinematic laws. We point out that rigorous arguments suggest a more urgent need to revise known theories to incorporate a fundamental acceleration scale already in flat space. The reciprocity principle can naturally do so. In addition to noticing links with string theory, we argue that the reciprocity principle implies an infinite-derivative generalization of the Einstein–Hilbert action that makes the gravitational interaction fundamentally nonlocal, thus providing a guiding principle that could lead us towards the formulation of a consistent theory of quantum gravity.

The observation of electromagnetic radiation emitted or absorbed by matter was instrumental in revealing the quantum properties of atoms and molecules in the early XX century, and constituted a turning-point in the development of the quantum theory. Quantum mechanics changes dramatically the way radiation and matter interact, making the probability of emission and absorption of light strongly frequency dependent, as clearly manifested in atomic spectra. In this essay, we advocate that gravitational radiation can play, for the quantum aspects of black holes, a similar role as electromagnetic radiation did for atoms, and that the advent of gravitational-wave astronomy can bring this fascinating possibility to the realm of observations.

This essay contends that in quantum gravity, some spatial regions do not admit a unitary Hilbert space. Because the gravitational path integral spontaneously breaks CPT symmetry, “states” with negative probability can be identified on either side of trapped surfaces. I argue that these negative norm states are tolerable, by analogy to quantum mechanics. This viewpoint suggests a resolution of the firewall paradox, similar to black hole complementarity. Implications for cosmology are briefly discussed.

Black holes constitute some of the most fascinating objects in our universe. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, they are also deceivingly simple: Schwarzschild black holes are completely determined by their mass. Moreover, the singularity theorems by Penrose and Hawking indicate that they host a curvature singularity within their event horizon. The presence of the latter invites the question whether these dead-end points of spacetime can be made regular by considering (quantum) corrections to the classical field equations. In this light, we use the Frobenius method to investigate the phase space of asymptotically flat, static, and spherically symmetric black hole solutions in quadratic gravity. We argue that the only asymptotically flat black hole solution visible in this approach is the Schwarzschild solution.

We argue that quantum gravity is nonlocal, first by recalling well-known arguments that support this idea and then by focusing on a point not usually emphasized: that making a conventional effective field theory (EFT) for quantum gravity is particularly difficult, and perhaps impossible in principle. This inability to realize an EFT comes down to the fact that gravity itself sets length scales for a problem: when integrating out degrees of freedom above some cutoff, the effective metric one uses will be different, which will itself re-define the cutoff. We also point out that even if the previous problem is fixed, naïvely applying EFT in gravity can lead to problems — we give a particular example in the case of black holes.

We describe and present the first observational evidence that light propagating near a rotating black hole is twisted in phase and carries orbital angular momentum. The novel use of this physical observable as an additional tool for the previously known techniques of gravitational lensing allows us to directly measure, for the first time, the spin parameter of a black hole. With the additional information encoded in the orbital angular momentum, not only can we reveal the actual rotation of the compact object, but we can also use rotating black holes as probes to test general relativity.

It is possible that both the classical description of spacetime and the rules of quantum field theory emerge from a more-fundamental structure of physical law. Pregeometric frameworks transfer some of the puzzles of quantum gravity to a semiclassical arena where those puzzles pose less of a challenge. However, in order to provide a satisfactory description of quantum gravity, a semiclassical description must emerge and contain in its description a macroscopic spacetime geometry, dynamical matter, and a gravitational interaction consistent with general relativity at long distances. In this essay, we argue that a framework that includes a stochastic origin for quantum field theory can provide both the emergence of classical spacetime and a quantized gravitational interaction.

In this paper, we consider a version of the Hayden–Preskill thought experiment in which the message thrown into the black hole is itself a smaller black hole. We then discuss the implications of the existence of a recovery channel for this black hole message at asymptotic infinity, resulting in a sharpening of the black hole information paradox for observers who never need to approach a horizon. We suggest decoherence mechanisms as a way of resolving this sharpened paradox.

A sufficiently massive star in the end of its life will inevitably collapse into a black hole as more deconfined degrees of freedom make the core ever softer. One possible way to avoid the singularity in the end is by dimensional phase transition of spacetime. Indeed, the black hole interior, two-dimensional (2D) in nature, can be described well as a perfect fluid of free massless Majorana fermions and gauge bosons under a 2D supersymmetric mirror model with new understanding of emergent gravity from dimensional evolution of spacetime. In particular, the 2D conformal invariance of the black hole gives rise to desired consistent results for the interior microphysics and structures including its temperature, density and entropy.

In the holographic picture, the Brout-Englert-Higgs (BEH) mechanism in $d$-dimensional Yang–Mills theories is conjectured to provide a Higgs-like mechanism for gravity in $d+1$ dimensions, resulting in massive (or massless) gravitons in IR (or UV) completions. Accordingly, one could imagine dual (magnetic-type) fields of massive gravitons in the IR (low-energy) limit that are coupled to the curl of their own energy–momentum, as well as to the rotation of matter fields on large scales. This hypothesis, which might solve cosmological issues currently ascribed to dark matter and dark energy, needs to be examined by the future Laser Interferometer Space Antenna mission using observations of gravitational waves emitted from extragalactic sources.

We present arguments that show why it is difficult to see rich extra dimensions in the universe. Conditions are found where significant size and variation of the extra dimensions in a Kaluza–Klein compactification lead to a black hole in the lower-dimensional theory. The idea is based on the hoop conjecture concerning black hole existence, as well as on the observation that dimensional reduction on macroscopically large, twisted, or highly dynamical extra dimensions contributes positively to the energy density in the lower-dimensional theory and can induce gravitational collapse. A threshold for the size is postulated on the order of $10^{-19}$m, whereby extra dimensions of length above this level must lie inside black holes, thus cloaking them from the view of outside observers. The threshold depends on the size of the universe, leading to speculation that in the early stages of evolution truly macroscopic and large extra dimensions would have been visible.

We show that the recipe for computing the expansions ${𝜃}_{\ell }$ and ${𝜃}_n$ of outgoing and ingoing null geodesics normal to a surface admits a covariance group with nonconstant scalar $\kappa (x)$, corresponding to the mapping ${𝜃}_{\ell }\to \kappa {𝜃}_{\ell }$, ${𝜃}_n\to {\kappa }^{-1}{𝜃}_n$. Under this mapping, the product ${𝜃}_{\ell }{𝜃}_n$ is invariant, and thus the marginal surface computed from the vanishing of ${𝜃}_{\ell }$, which is used to define the apparent horizon, is invariant. This covariance group naturally appears in comparing the expansions computed with different choices of coordinate system.

Classical black holes shield us from the singularities that inevitably appear in general relativity. Singularity regularization being one of the main landmarks for a successful theory of quantum gravity, quantum black holes are not obliged to hide their inner core from the outside world. Notwithstanding the aforesaid, it is often implicitly assumed that quantum gravity effects must remain confined to black hole interiors. In this essay, we argue in the opposite direction, discussing theoretical evidence for the existence of strong correlations between the physics inside and outside nonsingular black holes. We conclude that astronomical tests of the surroundings of black holes can provide invaluable information about their so-far unexplored interiors.

In this paper, we show that a smooth dynamic evolution from an initial unstable de Sitter stage to the standard radiation phase can analytically be described by a dominant noncanonical scalar field. For all practical purposes, at the end of the vacuum decaying process, the remaining potential energy density is completely stored in the kinetic part of the field satisfying the radiation equation of state. In this model, the early universe is nonsingular, free of horizon and different from many inflationary variants none post-inflationary reheating is required since the formation of the thermal bath is concomitant with inflation. The thermodynamic evolution of the thermal bath is determined. It is also shown that the resulting noncanonical cosmology can be rigorously interpreted as a dynamical $\mathrm{\Lambda }$-model (vacuum fluid) whose spontaneous decaying process into radiation may be the origin of the primeval thermal bath.

The suggestion that there is a maximum luminosity (maximum power) in nature has a long and somewhat convoluted history. Though this idea is commonly attributed to Freeman Dyson, he was actually much more circumspect in his views. What is certainly true is that dimensional analysis shows that the speed of light and Newton’s constant of gravitation can be combined to define a quantity $P_{\ast }=\frac{c^5}{G_N}$ with the dimensions of luminosity (equivalently, power). Then in any physical situation, we must have $P_{\mathrm{\text{physical}}}=\wp P_{\ast }$, where the quantity $\wp$ is some dimensionless function of dimensionless parameters. This led some authors to suggest a maximum luminosity/maximum power conjecture. Working within the framework of standard general relativity, we will re-assess this conjecture, paying particular attention to the extent to which various examples and counter-examples are physically reasonable. We focus specifically on Vaidya spacetimes, and on an evaporating version of Schwarzschild’s constant density star. For both of these spacetimes, luminosity can be arbitrarily large. We argue that any luminosity bound must depend on delicate internal features of the radiating object.

Black hole thermodynamics suggests that in order to describe the physics of distant observers, one may model a black hole as a standard quantum system with a density of states set by the Bekenstein–Hawking entropy $S_{\mathrm{\text{BH}}}$. This idea has long been considered to be in strong tension with Hawking’s prediction that radiation from black holes is nearly thermal, and with low-energy gravity more generally. But the past two years have shown that low-energy gravity does offer a self-consistent description of black hole evaporation consistent with the above idea, and which in particular reproduces the famous Page curve. We provide a brief overview of this new paradigm, focusing on Lorentz-signature asymptotically-flat spacetimes and emphasizing operationally defined observables that probe the entropy of Hawking radiation.

The string tension does not have to be put in by hand, it can be dynamically generated, as in the case when we formulate string theory in the modified measure formalism, and other formulations as well. Then string tension appears, but as an additional dynamical degree of freedom. It can be seen however that this string tension is not universal, but rather each string generates its own string tension, which can have a different value for each string. We also define a new Tension scalar background field which change locally the value of the string tension along the world sheets of the strings. When there are many strings with different string tensions this Tension field can be determined from the requirement of world sheet conformal invariance and for two types of string tensions depending on the relative sign of the tensions we obtain nonsingular cosmologies and warp space scenarios and when the two string tensions are positive, we obtain scenarios where the Hagedorn temperature is avoided in the early universe or in regions of warped space time where the string tensions become very big.

In this essay, we will take a wonderful ride on a dark bubble with strings attached, which carries our universe out of the swampland and makes it realizable in the landscape of string theory. To find the way to the landscape, we make use of apparently hostile corners of the swampland and their instabilities.

In this essay, we show that if one starts with a universe with some matter and a cosmological constant, then quantum mechanics naturally induces an attractive gravitational potential and an effective Newton’s coupling. Thus, gravity is an emergent phenomenon and what should be quantized are the fundamental degrees of freedom from which it emerges.

If dark matter exists in the form of ultralight fermionic and bosonic species, then (a) it can accelerate evaporation of astrophysical black holes to the extent that their lifetimes can be reduced to astronomical time scales, and (b) if there are extremely large number of such species it has the potential to solve the hierarchy problem [H. Davoudiasl, P. B. Denton and D. A. McGady, Phys. Rev. D 103 (2021) 055014; G. Dvali, Fortschr. Phys. 58 (2010) 528]. Here, we put forward a proposal that darkness of many of these new particles is natural, and in addition, the net zero point energy of the fermions exactly cancels that coming from the new bosons. The needed fermion–boson equality, and matching the fermion–boson degrees of freedom, comes about naturally. A very direct argument that allows the departure from the spin–statistics theorem is presented.