Snowmass 2021 White Paper: Observational Signatures of Quantum Gravity
Kathryn M. Zurek

TL;DR
This paper reviews recent theoretical insights into how quantum gravity effects at the Planck scale could manifest at large scales, suggesting potential experimental detection methods using interferometry.
Contribution
It introduces a simple physical model, based on random walk intuition, connecting ultraviolet quantum gravity effects to observable infrared phenomena, supported by various formal approaches.
Findings
Quantum gravity effects may accumulate at large scales as L^2 pprox _p L/4a0pi
Random walk intuition aligns with calculations from AdS/CFT and shockwave models
Experimental detection prospects with interferometers are discussed
Abstract
This short review is intended as a colloquium-level summary, for the Snowmass 2021 process, on recent theoretical results on infrared observables in quantum gravity. We rely on simple physical arguments, most notably a random walk intuition, to show how effects of quantum gravity in the ultraviolet (at the Planck length ) may integrate into the infrared when the large measurement length scale enters into the observable. A quantum uncertainty at lightsheet horizons would give rise to an accumulated effect of size . We discuss how the random walk intuition falls out from more formal calculations, such as from AdS/CFT, from the dimensional reduction of the Einstein-Hilbert action to dilaton gravity, from multiple gravitational shockwaves generated by vacuum energy fluctuations, as well as from an effective description…
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Taxonomy
TopicsComputational Physics and Python Applications · Experimental and Theoretical Physics Studies · Earth Systems and Cosmic Evolution
