Research in Quantum, Classical Gravity and Cosmology

物理学的进步总是在三个方面进行：观察/实验，现象学-数据的连贯编纂-最后，理论-通过一般定律找到对这些描述的更深层次的理解。目前，无论是微观的，如见证标题“大型强子对撞机”的结果，和宇宙尺度，如最新的“普朗克”地图，迅速发展，给理论带来了可喜的压力。我们的工作是在“深层”理论方面，试图找到“标准模型”爱因斯坦引力的可能概括的暗示，这说明了它与其他壮观的成功的偏差。这里我们特别指的是对暗物质的明显需要，我们希望将其简化为几何效应，而不是通过添加托勒密粒子，同时又不放弃几何的美。因此，我们的部分努力将是继续我们最近的结果，排除目前流行的“大质量引力”，因为后者失去了所有的几何美，而是释放了太多的变量，失去了几何描述的紧密性。事实上，正如广义相对论的杨-米尔斯场论对应物被证明排除了大质量扩展，而是依赖于现在LHC观察到的希格斯场一样，看起来我们基本的相互作用“胶”理论，杨-米尔斯和麦克斯韦的美丽的“孤立”性质也将扩展到引力。在建设性的一面，我们打算寻找-不太基本的“有效”的、非局部的但仍然是几何的定律，这些定律用利用“爱因斯坦”图景中剩余的自由的附加项来取代暗物质的future。 用更容易理解的话来说，让我们把我们的努力放在当前的前线物理学框架内，一个最近在实验室里受到媒体关注的框架--特别是在LHC加速器上发现的“希格斯”场，以及在我们宇宙的另一端--通过例如普朗克和其他宇宙天文台提供的最新壮观图片，当它看起来仅仅是它膨胀到现在的130亿年的三分之一的时候，我们整个宇宙。我们的目标是通过尽可能保守地扩展爱因斯坦的广义相对论来解释暗物质和其他意想不到的新的大尺度特征，从而理解我们世界的这些一般特征。我们计划的保守部分是排除那些走得太远的候选人，因为他们违反了广义相对论提出的弯曲空间的图景（现在已经很熟悉了）。因此，我们的双重方法严格控制了我们来之不易的宇宙图景中的好的“几何”部分，同时在这个领域内扩展了它的范围，特别是通过探索物质和几何可以在那里相互作用的不同方式。我们可以肯定，观察的惊喜将保持领先于我们的创造能力，但这是引导总是工作，并照亮我们的世界！

Physical progress always proceeds on three fronts: observational/experimental, phenomenological--a coherent codifying of the data-- and finally, theoretical--finding a deeper understanding, through general laws, of those descriptions. The present rapid progress of both micro-, as witness the headline "LHC" results, and cosmo-scales, such as the newest "Planck" maps, puts welcome pressure on theory. Our work is on the "deep" theory side, attempting to find hints of possible generalizations of the "standard model", Einstein Gravity, that account for the deviations from its otherwise spectacular successes. Here we especially mean the apparent need for dark matter, which we hope to reduce to geometrical effects rather than by adding on Ptolemaic particles, without giving up the beauty of geometry. Thus, part of our efforts will be to continue our very recent results that exclude the currently popular "massive Gravity", because the latter loses all the beauty of geometry, instead unleashing too many variants and losing the tightness of geometrical description. Indeed, just as the Yang-Mills field theory counterparts of General Relativity were shown to exclude massive extensions, but relied instead on the now LHC-observed Higgs field, it looks as if the beautiful "isolated" nature of our basic interacting "glue" theories, Yang -Mills and Maxwell, will extend to gravity as well. On the constructive side, we intend to look for--less fundamental "effective", non-local but still geometrical, laws that replace the fuzziness of dark matter by additional terms that exploit the freedom remaining in the "Einstein" picture. In more accessible terms, let us place our efforts within the present framework of front-line Physics, one that has received much recent media attention both in the Laboratory--especially the discovery of the "Higgs" field at the LHC accelerator, and at the opposite end of our universe-- by for example the newest spectacular pictures presented by the Planck, and other Cosmic observatories, of our entire Universe as it looked a mere third of a million years into its expansion the its present 13 billion. Our aim is to understand such general features of our world by--as conservative as possible--extensions of Einstein's General Relativity to account for Dark Matter and other unexpected new large-scale features. The conservative part of our program is to exclude candidates that go too far, by violating the (by now familiar) picture of curved space that General Relativity presents. So our twofold approach keeps a tight rein on that good, "geometrical", part of our hard-won picture of the Universe, while extending its reach within this realm, in particular by exploring different ways in which matter and geometry can interact there. We may be sure that the observational surprises will stay ahead of our inventive abilities, but that's the bootstrap that always works, and illuminates our world!