Research in Quantum, Classical Gravity and Cosmology

物理进步总是在三个方面进行：观察/实验，现象学-对数据进行连贯的编纂-最后是理论-通过这些描述的一般规律找到更深层次的理解。目前，微观（如“大型强子对撞机”的头条结果）和宇宙尺度（如最新的“普朗克”地图）的快速发展都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——的可能概括的线索，以解释它在其他方面取得的惊人成功的偏差。这里我们特别指的是对暗物质的明显需求，我们希望在不放弃几何之美的前提下，将其简化为几何效应，而不是通过添加托勒密粒子。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之美，而是释放了太多的变体，失去了几何描述的紧密性。事实上，正如广义相对论的杨-米尔斯场论被证明排除了大质量的延伸，而是依赖于现在lhc观测到的希格斯场，看起来我们基本的相互作用“胶水”理论，杨-米尔斯和麦克斯韦的美丽的“孤立”性质，也将延伸到引力。在建设性的方面，我们打算寻找——不那么基本的“有效的”、非局部的、但仍然是几何的定律，用利用“爱因斯坦”图景中剩余的自由的附加术语来取代暗物质的模糊性。用更通俗易懂的话说，让我们把我们的努力放在当前的前沿物理学框架内，这一框架最近在实验室受到了很多媒体的关注——尤其是在大型强子对撞机加速器上发现的“希格斯”场，以及在我们宇宙的另一端——例如普朗克和其他宇宙天文台展示的最新壮观的图片，我们整个宇宙膨胀的三分之一万年，现在的130亿年。我们的目标是通过——尽可能保守地——爱因斯坦广义相对论的延伸来理解我们世界的这些一般特征，以解释暗物质和其他意想不到的新大规模特征。我们计划的保守部分是排除那些走得太远的候选者，因为它们违反了广义相对论所呈现的弯曲空间的图像（现在我们已经熟悉了）。因此，我们的双重方法严格控制了我们来之不易的宇宙图像中良好的“几何”部分，同时扩展了它在这个领域的范围，特别是通过探索物质和几何在那里相互作用的不同方式。我们可以肯定，观察的惊喜将保持在我们的发明能力之前，但这是始终有效的引导，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!