Prof. Eran Palti (pictured below) of the Department of Physics has been awarded a DFG- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft program German Israeli Project Cooperation (DIP) grant for 2022. Fourteen proposals are submitted to the foundation annually, but only two are funded.
The five-year grant is worth 1.65 million euros divided between the Israeli and German partners. Additional group members include Prof. Ramy Brustein and Dr. Shira Chapman also of the Department of Physics and Prof. Dieter Lüst of the Max-Planck-Institut für Physik.
The project is entitled "Holography and the Swampland: Constraints on theories of fundamental physics from compatibility with quantum gravity". Prof. Palti and his colleagues have taken on an exciting challenge – combining two different fields to answer problems in quantum physics.
Specifically, the project will address one of the key open questions in fundamental theoretical physics: how to combine quantum mechanics with gravity in a consistent way. Such a combined theory, termed a theory of quantum gravity, is still missing. The research will determine the general features or key characteristics that any such theory must possess. It will do this by combining results from the field of string theory with the field of gravitational holography: Holography being the property of gravity which determines that it can be described, by a non-gravitational theory, which lives in one less dimension than gravity.
Prof. Eran Palti did his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees at the University of Oxford and his Ph.D. at the University of Sussex. Postdoctoral work was conducted through an STFC Postdoctoral Fellowship grant at the University of Oxford and a Marie Curie Fellowship grant at Ecole Polytechnique, Paris. He then moved to Germany where he was a Junior Research Group Leader at the University of Heidelberg and then a Research Group Leader at the Max-Planck Institute for Physics, Munich.
Related links:
Link to news item on the Max-Planck-Institut für Physik website
