Quantum gravity phenomenology
On the 10th of November 2021 a review paper titled Quantum gravity phenomenology at the dawn of the multi-messenger era. A review (arXiv:2111.05659) was published. Among the authors are three employees of the Institute of Theoretical Physics: Jerzy Kowalski-Glikman, Giacomo Rosati, and Tomasz Trześniewski (in the mentioned paper still affiliated as an employee of the Jagiellonian University).
Exploration of the Universe in the recent years has entered a new era, characterised by a constant increase of the amount and quality of experimental data, obtained by taking into account many cosmic messengers (multi-messengers), i.e. photons, neutrinos, cosmic rays, and gravitational waves coming from numerous sources. They give us information about their sources in the Universe and the properties of the intergalactic medium. Moreover, astronomical studies using multi-messengers have the opportunity to search for phenomenological signatures of quantum gravity.
On the one hand, the most energetic events allow us to test our physical theories at energy regimes which are not directly accessible in accelerators; on the other hand, tiny effects in the propagation of very high energy particles could be amplified by cosmological distances.
After decades of merely theoretical investigations, the possibility of obtaining phenomenological indications of Planck-scale effects is a revolutionary step in the quest for a quantum theory of gravity, but it requires cooperation between different communities of physicists (both theoretical and experimental).
For more information on this work, see the video below:
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