Quo Vadis Particula Physica?

In this brief paper, I give a very personal account on the state of particle physics on the occasion of Paul Frampton's 80th birthday.

Quantum Hair from Gravity.

We explore the relationship between the quantum state of a compact matter source and of its asymptotic graviton field. For a matter source in an energy eigenstate, the graviton state is determined at leading order by the energy eigenvalue. Insofar as there are no accidental energy degeneracies there is a one to one map between graviton states on the boundary of spacetime and the matter source states.

Non-minimal Coupling of the Higgs Boson to Curvature in an Inflationary Universe.

In the absence of new physics around GeV, the electroweak vacuum is at best metastable. This represents a major challenge for high scale inflationary models as, during the early rapid expansion of the universe, it seems difficult to understand how the Higgs vacuum would not decay to the true lower vacuum of the theory with catastrophic consequences if inflation took place at a scale above GeV. In this paper we show that the non-minimal coupling of the Higgs boson to curvature could solve this problem by generating a direct coupling of the Higgs boson to the inflationary potential thereby stabilizing the electroweak vacuum.

Gravitational radiation in quantum gravity.

The effective field theory of quantum gravity generically predicts non-locality to be present in the effective action, which results from the low-energy propagation of gravitons and massless matter. Working to second order in gravitational curvature, we reconsider the effects of quantum gravity on the gravitational radiation emitted from a binary system. In particular, we calculate for the first time the leading order quantum gravitational correction to the classical quadrupole radiation formula which appears at second order in Newton's constant.

Dark matter in quantum gravity.

We show that quantum gravity, whatever its ultra-violet completion might be, could account for dark matter. Indeed, besides the massless gravitational field recently observed in the form of gravitational waves, the spectrum of quantum gravity contains two massive fields respectively of spin 2 and spin 0. If these fields are long-lived, they could easily account for dark matter.

Gravitational effective action at second order in curvature and gravitational waves.

We consider the full effective theory for quantum gravity at second order in curvature including non-local terms. We show that the theory contains two new degrees of freedom beyond the massless graviton: namely a massive spin-2 ghost and a massive scalar field. Furthermore, we show that it is impossible to fine-tune the parameters of the effective action to eliminate completely the classical spin-2 ghost because of the non-local terms in the effective action.

Cosmological evolution of the Higgs boson's vacuum expectation value.

We point out that the expansion of the universe leads to a cosmological time evolution of the vacuum expectation of the Higgs boson. Within the standard model of particle physics, the cosmological time evolution of the vacuum expectation of the Higgs leads to a cosmological time evolution of the masses of the fermions and of the electroweak gauge bosons, while the scale of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) remains constant. Precise measurements of the cosmological time evolution of , where and are, respectively, the electron and proton mass (which is essentially determined by the QCD scale), therefore provide a test of the standard models of particle physics and of cosmology.

Quantum mechanics, gravity and modified quantization relations.

In this paper, we investigate a possible energy scale dependence of the quantization rules and, in particular, from a phenomenological point of view, an energy scale dependence of an effective [Formula: see text] (reduced Planck's constant). We set a bound on the deviation of the value of [Formula: see text] at the muon scale from its usual value using measurements of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. Assuming that inflation has taken place, we can conclude that nature is described by a quantum theory at least up to an energy scale of about 10(16) GeV.

Bounds on the nonminimal coupling of the Higgs boson to gravity.

We derive the first bound on the value of the Higgs boson nonminimal coupling to the Ricci scalar. We show that the recent discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN implies that the nonminimal coupling is smaller than 2.6×10(15).

Grand unification and enhanced quantum gravitational effects.

In grand unified theories with large numbers of fields, renormalization effects significantly modify the scale at which quantum gravity becomes strong. This in turn can modify the boundary conditions for coupling constant unification, if higher dimensional operators induced by gravity are taken into consideration. We show that the generic size of, and the uncertainty in, these effects from gravity can be larger than the two-loop corrections typically considered in renormalization group analyses of unification.

Dynamics of the Fisher information metric.

We present a method to generate probability distributions that correspond to metrics obeying partial differential equations generated by extremizing a functional J [g(mu nu) (theta(i)) ] , where g(mu nu) (theta(i)) is the Fisher metric. We postulate that this functional of the dynamical variable g(mu nu) (theta(i)) is stationary with respect to small variations of these variables. Our approach enables a dynamical approach to the Fisher information metric.

Minimum length from quantum mechanics and classical general relativity.

We derive fundamental limits on measurements of position, arising from quantum mechanics and classical general relativity. First, we show that any primitive probe or target used in an experiment must be larger than the Planck length lP. This suggests a Planck-size minimum ball of uncertainty in any measurement.