Contributor info: Dr Olga Papadoulaki

Luca Buoninfante, Benjamin Knorr, K. Sravan Kumar, Alessia Platania, Damiano Anselmi, Ivano Basile, N. Emil J. Bjerrum-Bohr, Robert Brandenberger, Mariana Carrillo González, Anne-Christine Davis, Bianca Dittrich, Paolo Di Vecchia, John F. Donoghue, Fay Dowker, Gia Dvali, Astrid Eichhorn, Steven B. Giddings, Alessandra Gnecchi, Giulia Gubitosi, Lavinia Heisenberg, Renata Kallosh, Alexey S. Koshelev, Stefano Liberati, Renate Loll, Leonardo Modesto, Paulo Moniz, Daniele Oriti, Olga Papadoulaki, Jan M. Pawlowski, Roberto Percacci, Lesław Rachwał, Mairi Sakellariadou, Alberto Salvio, Kellogg Stelle, Sumati Surya, Arkady Tseytlin, Neil Turok, Thomas Van Riet, Richard P. Woodard

SciPost Phys. Comm. Rep. 11 (2025) · published 25 August 2025 | Toggle abstract · pdf

To deepen our understanding of Quantum Gravity and its connections with black holes and cosmology, building a common language and exchanging ideas across different approaches is crucial. The Nordita Program "Quantum Gravity: from gravitational effective field theories to ultraviolet complete approaches" created a platform for extensive discussions, aimed at pinpointing both common grounds and sources of disagreements, with the hope of generating ideas and driving progress in the field. This contribution summarizes the twelve topical discussions held during the program and collects individual thoughts of speakers and panelists on the future of the field in light of these discussions.

Panagiotis Betzios, Nava Gaddam, Olga Papadoulaki

SciPost Phys. Core 4, 032 (2021) · published 10 December 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

Quantum gravity is expected to gauge all global symmetries of effective theories, in the ultraviolet. Inspired by this expectation, we explore the consequences of gauging CPT as a quantum boundary condition in phase space. We find that it provides for a natural semiclassical regularisation and discretisation of the continuous spectrum of a quantum Hamiltonian related to the Dilation operator. We observe that the said spectrum is in correspondence with the zeros of the Riemann zeta and Dirichlet beta functions. Following ideas of Berry and Keating, this may help the pursuit of the Riemann hypothesis. It strengthens the proposal that this quantum Hamiltonian captures the near horizon dynamics of the scattering matrix of the Schwarzschild black hole, given the rich chaotic spectrum upon discretisation. It also explains why the spectrum appears to be erratic despite the unitarity of the scattering matrix.

Chandramouli Chowdhury, Olga Papadoulaki, and Suvrat Raju

SciPost Phys. 10, 106 (2021) · published 17 May 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

We consider a set of observers who live near the boundary of global AdS, and are allowed to act only with simple low-energy unitaries and make measurements in a small interval of time. The observers are not allowed to leave the near-boundary region. We describe a physical protocol that nevertheless allows these observers to obtain detailed information about the bulk state. This protocol utilizes the leading gravitational back-reaction of a bulk excitation on the metric, and also relies on the entanglement-structure of the vacuum. For low-energy states, we show how the near-boundary observers can use this protocol to completely identify the bulk state. We explain why the protocol fails completely in theories without gravity, including non-gravitational gauge theories. This provides perturbative evidence for the claim that one of the signatures of holography --- the fact that information about the bulk is also available near the boundary --- is already visible in the low-energy theory of gravity.