The Limits of Quantum Field Theory

At the June 2021 Innovation Hour, Hertz Fellow and physicist Grant Remmen explores what we can prove about which laws of physics are possible.

Hints of new physics are encoded as small correction terms in quantum field theories. The couplings of these terms, "dial settings" in the low-energy laws of nature, can be bounded using methods independent of the microscopic physics: principles like causality, locality, unitarity of quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics. 

In this talk, Grant will show how such techniques can be used to constrain the effective field theory of the Standard Model of particle physics, as well as corrections to Einstein gravity. These constraints have important implications, ranging from near-term experimental observations to the ultimate fate of black holes, and provide us with powerful means to test the tenets of quantum field theory itself.

This Hertz Foundation Innovation Hour will take place live on Saturday, June 12, 2021, from 9:00–10:00am Pacific, using the Zoom video conference platform. You can attend on a desktop, mobile device, or by phone. Please register using the form below, and we'll email you the Zoom meeting information.

Grant Remmen is a postdoctoral scholar at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Fundamental Physics Fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara, having previously been a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley.

A Hertz and NSF Fellow, Grant obtained his PhD in physics in 2017 at the California Institute of Technology, advised by Clifford Cheung and Sean Carroll. Grant’s work in high-energy physics spans quantum field theory, particle physics, general relativity, string theory, and cosmology, with a focus on proving theoretical constraints on new laws of physics waiting to be discovered.