19/12/2016: ERC Consolidator Grant for Ben Freivogel

ben-freivogelThe European Research Council has awarded a prestigious Consolidator Grant to GRAPPA researcher Ben Freivogel, for the project “Quantifying Quantum Gravity Violations of Causality and the Equivalence Principle”

Freivogel’s ERC project intends to accurately identify the circumstances and scales where quantum-mechanical effects of gravity become relevant. Although these quantum effects are typically believed to be extremely tiny on scales that can be probed experimentally, recent results of Freivogel and others suggest that under certain circumstances quantum gravity effects can become large and perhaps even observable on much larger, macroscopic, length scales. This could in particular have major consequences for the possibility to probe quantum gravity through cosmology.