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Alessia Platania

Publications and source records attributed to Alessia Platania.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Asymptotic Safety in Generalized Proca Theories

Generalized Proca Theories are the most general higher-derivative extensions of a massive vector field that retain second-order equations of motion. They are phenomenologically interesting as models of dynamical dark energy that, unlike scalar-tensor theories, can naturally accommodate cosmological anisotropies. A key open question is whether such theories can be fundamental. As a first step in this direction, we investigate whether they admit an ultraviolet completion within a quantum field theory framework, working with a truncation comprising up to four powers of the Proca field and up to two derivatives. We find a triplet of non-Gaussian ultraviolet fixed points, that lie very close to one another. Only one of them features a non-tachyonic Proca mass and could thus serve as a consistent ultraviolet completion for Generalized Proca Theories. We name it the Proca fixed point. We discuss its stability and contrast its features with those of the standard Reuter fixed point of the asymptotic safety scenario for quantum gravity and matter. In particular, we show that the Gaussian and Reuter fixed points lie on singular hypersurfaces of the flow of Generalized Proca Theories, yet can act as quasi-fixed points in certain regimes.

hep-th↗
arXiv2025

Asymptotic safety, quantum gravity, and the swampland: a conceptual assessment

We provide a conceptual assessment of some aspects of fundamental quantum field theories of gravity in light of foundational aspects of the swampland program. On the one hand, asymptotically safe quantum gravity may provide a simple and predictive framework, thanks to a finite number of relevant parameters. On the other hand, a (sub-)set of intertwined swampland conjectures on the consistency of quantum gravity can be argued to be universal via effective field theory considerations. We answer whether some foundational features of these frameworks are compatible. This involves revisiting and refining several arguments (and loopholes) concerning the relation between field-theoretic descriptions of gravity and general swampland ideas. We identify the thermodynamics of black holes, spacetime topology change, and holography as the core aspects of this relation. We draw lessons on the features that a field theoretic description of gravity must (not) have to be consistent with fundamental principles underlying the swampland program, and on the universality of the latter.

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arXiv2025

Visions in Quantum Gravity

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.

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arXiv2025

Lectures in Quantum Gravity

Formulating a quantum theory of gravity lies at the heart of fundamental theoretical physics. This collection of lecture notes encompasses a selection of topics that were covered in six mini-courses at the Nordita PhD school "Towards Quantum Gravity". The scope was to provide a coherent picture, from its foundation to forefront research, emphasizing connections between different areas. The lectures begin with perturbative quantum gravity and effective field theory. Subsequently, two ultraviolet-complete approaches are presented: asymptotically safe gravity and string theory. Finally, elements of quantum effects in black hole spacetimes are discussed.

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arXiv2025

Charting GLOBs in Asymptotically Safe Gravity

Computing the gravitational effective action provides a direct route to charting the landscape of admissible black hole spacetimes and their alternatives, which we will collectively call "gravitationally localized objects" (GLOBs). In this work, we provide a proof of principle of this idea within the framework of asymptotically safe gravity. Focusing on the Einstein-Weyl truncation, we identify the unique ultraviolet-complete trajectory emanating from the asymptotically safe fixed point and use it to extract the Wilson coefficient of the Weyl-squared term. This allows us to chart the corresponding GLOBs in a "phase diagram", showing that wormholes dominate a large portion of it, whereas the classical Bachian naked singularities become disfavored. Our results illustrate how quantum gravity can constrain effective field theory and the associated set of allowed spacetimes, yielding a rich landscape of beyond-general-relativity solutions rather than a single alternative to classical black holes.

gr-qc↗
arXiv2025

Impact of quantum gravity on the UV sensitivity of extremal black holes

Recent work has revealed that extremal Kerr black holes may exhibit a sensitivity to higher-derivative corrections to Einstein's equations, displaying singularities in the tidal forces at the horizon. However, in a purely gravitational context, this "ultraviolet sensitivity" translates into a strong dependence on the Wilson coefficients in the low-energy effective field theory. These, in turn, are fixed by the underlying theory of quantum gravity in the ultraviolet. We find a prediction for these coefficients within the framework of asymptotically safe quantum gravity, and show that, if the quantum gravity scale is trans-Planckian, this horizon-scale ultraviolet sensitivity is avoided.

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arXiv2025

Towards a Non-singular Paradigm of Black Hole Physics

The study of regular black holes and black hole mimickers as alternatives to standard black holes has recently gained significant attention, driven both by the need to extend general relativity to describe black hole interiors, and by recent advances in observational technologies. Despite considerable progress in this field, significant challenges remain in identifying and characterizing physically well-motivated classes of regular black holes and black hole mimickers. This report provides an overview of these challenges, and outlines some of the promising research directions -- as discussed during a week-long focus programme held at the Institute for Fundamental Physics of the Universe (IFPU) in Trieste from November 11th to 15th, 2024.

gr-qc↗
arXiv2024

Black Holes Inside and Out 2024: visions for the future of black hole physics

The gravitational physics landscape is evolving rapidly, driven by our ability to study strong-field regions, in particular black holes. Black Holes Inside and Out gathered world experts to discuss the status of the field and prospects ahead. We hope that the ideas and perspectives are a source of inspiration. Structure: Black Hole Evaporation - 50 Years by William Unruh The Stability Problem for Extremal Black Holes by Mihalis Dafermos The Entropy of Black Holes by Robert M. Wald The Non-linear Regime of Gravity by Luis Lehner Black Holes Galore in D > 4 by Roberto Emparan Same as Ever: Looking for (In)variants in the Black Holes Landscape by Carlos A. R. Herdeiro Black Holes, Cauchy Horizons, and Mass Inflation by Matt Visser The Backreaction Problem for Black Holes in Semiclassical Gravity by Adrian del Rio Black Holes Beyond General Relativity by Enrico Barausse and Jutta Kunz Black Holes as Laboratories: Searching for Ultralight Fields by Richard Brito Primordial Black Holes from Inflation by Misao Sasaki Tests of General Relativity with Future Detectors by Emanuele Berti Black Holes as Laboratories: Tests of General Relativity by Ruth Gregory and Samaya Nissanke Simulating Black Hole Imposters by Frans Pretorius Black Hole Spectroscopy: Status Report by Gregorio Carullo VLBI as a Precision Strong Gravity Instrument by Paul Tiede Testing the nature of compact objects and the black hole paradigm by Mariafelicia De Laurentis and Paolo Pani Some Thoughts about Black Holes in Asymptotic Safety by Alessia Platania Black Hole Evaporation in Loop Quantum Gravity by Abhay Ashtekar How the Black Hole Puzzles are Resolved in String Theory by Samir D. Mathur Quantum Black Holes: From Regularization to Information Paradoxes by Niayesh Afshordi and Stefano Liberati

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arXiv2024

Unearthing the intersections: positivity bounds, weak gravity conjecture, and asymptotic safety landscapes from photon-graviton flows

We compute the asymptotic safety landscape stemming from ultraviolet-complete photon-graviton flows in a field theoretic setup, and we confront it with the weak gravity conjecture and, for the first time, with positivity bounds. At fourth order in derivatives, we find two gravitational fixed points providing viable ultraviolet completions for the theory. One of them comes with a single relevant direction, which sets the scale of quantum gravity. The corresponding sub-landscape is a single point. The second fixed point yields a richer sub-landscape of effective theories, most of which is described by an approximately straight line in the space of dimensionless Wilson coefficients. We additionally discover that: (i) the two sub-landscapes are continuously connected via a small "candy cane" regime, and the whole asymptotic safety landscape falls onto a plane; this is consistent with earlier findings and could be a universal feature in Asymptotic Safety; (ii) in such a field-theoretic setup, the Euler coupling plays a special role, as it is unconstrained by quantum scale invariance, but can enter off-shell bounds such as entropy-based positivity constraints; (iii) Planck-scale-suppressed violations of both weak gravity and positivity bounds occur across the landscape. The latter result resonates with expectations grounded on effective field theory arguments.

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arXiv2024

Black Holes in Asymptotically Safe Gravity

In this chapter we review the state-of-the-art of black holes in asymptotically safe gravity. After a brief recap of the asymptotic safety program, we shall summarize the features of asymptotic-safety-inspired black-hole models that have been constructed in the past by the so-called renormalization group improvement. Specifically, we will discuss static configurations, both in spherically- and axially-symmetric settings, the role played by the cosmological constant, and the impact of the collapse dynamics in determining black-hole configurations realized in Nature. In particular, we will review how quantum gravity could modify the Buchdahl limit and the corresponding conditions to form ultra-compact objects and Planckian black holes. We will then proceed by describing the most recent developments, particularly those aiming at making model building in asymptotic safety more rigorous and free from ambiguities. These include self-consistent and coordinate-independent versions of the renormalization group improvement, and next steps to fill the gap between model building and renormalization group computations in asymptotic safety. Finally, we will focus on a selection of results that have been obtained from first-principle calculations or arguments, within and beyond asymptotic safety. Concretely, we will review the state-of-the-art in determining black-hole entropy in asymptotic safety from a microstate counting, and progress in deriving the quantum-corrected Newtonian potential. We will discuss how in quantum gravity theories linked to a gravitational path integral singularity resolution could be achieved by a dynamical suppression of singular configurations. Finally, we will show that -- independent of the specific ultraviolet completion of gravity -- asymptotic modifications to Schwarzschild black holes are strongly constrained by the principle of least action at large distance scales.

gr-qc↗
arXiv2024

Sifting quantum black holes through the principle of least action

We tackle the question of whether regular black holes or other alternatives to the Schwarzschild solution can arise from an action principle in quantum gravity. Focusing on an asymptotic expansion of such solutions and inspecting the corresponding field equations, we demonstrate that their realization within a principle of stationary action would require either fine-tuning, or strong infrared non-localities in the gravitational effective action. This points to an incompatibility between large-distance locality and many of the proposed alternatives to classical black holes.

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arXiv2023

Formation and evaporation of quantum black holes from the decoupling mechanism in quantum gravity

We propose a new method to account for quantum-gravitational effects in cosmological and black hole spacetimes. At the core of our construction is the "decoupling mechanism": when a physical infrared scale overcomes the effect of the regulator implementing the Wilsonian integration of fluctuating modes, the renormalization group flow of the scale-dependent effective action freezes out, so that at the decoupling scale the latter approximates the standard quantum effective action. Identifying the decoupling scale allows to access terms in the effective action that were not part of the original truncation and thus to study leading-order quantum corrections to field equations and their solutions. Starting from the Einstein-Hilbert truncation, we exploit for the first time the decoupling mechanism in quantum gravity to investigate the dynamics of quantum-corrected black holes from formation to evaporation. Our findings are in qualitative agreement with previous results in the context of renormalization group improved black holes, but additionally feature novel properties reminiscent of higher-derivative operators with specific non-local form factors.

gr-qc↗
arXiv2023

Diverging black hole entropy from quantum infrared non-localities

Local higher-derivative corrections to the Einstein-Hilbert action yield sub-leading corrections to the Bekenstein-Hawking area law. Here we show that if the quantum effective action comprises a certain class of infrared non-localities, the entropy of large black holes generally diverges to either positive or negative infinity. In such theories, large spherically symmetric black holes would be either highly chaotic or thermodynamically impossible, respectively. In turn, this puts strong constraints on the Laurent expansion of the form factors in the effective action.

hep-th↗
arXiv2022

Causality, unitarity and stability in quantum gravity: a non-perturbative perspective

Resumming quantum fluctuations at the level of the gravitational path integral is expected to result in non-local effective actions and thus in a non-trivial momentum dependence of the propagator. Which properties the (dressed) graviton propagator has to satisfy and whether they can all be met are key open questions. In this work we present criteria and conditions for the momentum dependence of a graviton propagator which is consistent with unitarity, causality, and stability in a non-perturbative setting. To this end, we revisit several aspects of these conditions, highlighting some caveats and subtleties that got lost in recent discussions, and spelling out others that to our best knowledge have not been studied in detail. We discuss the consequences of these concepts for the properties of the graviton propagator. Finally, we provide examples of propagators satisfying unitarity and causality, while avoiding tachyonic and vacuum instabilities, and allowing for an analytic Wick rotation.

hep-th↗
arXiv2022

On the reconstruction problem in Quantum Gravity

Path integrals and the Wilsonian renormalization group provide two complementary computational tools for investigating continuum approaches to quantum gravity. The starting points of these constructions utilize a bare action and a fixed point of the renormalization group flow, respectively. While it is clear that there should be a connection between these ingredients, their relation is far from trivial. This results in the so-called reconstruction problem. In this work, we demonstrate that the map between these two formulations does not generate non-localities at quadratic order in the background curvature. At this level, the bare action in the path integral and the fixed-point action obtained from the Wilsonian renormalization group differ by local terms only. This conclusion does not apply to theories coming with a physical ultraviolet cutoff or a fundamental non-locality scale.

hep-th↗
arXiv2022

Configuration space for quantum gravity in a locally regularized path integral

We discuss some aspects of the metric configuration space in quantum gravity in the background field formalism. We give a necessary and sufficient condition for the parameterization of Euclidean metric fluctuations such that i) the signature of the metric is preserved in all configurations that enter the gravitational path integral, and ii) the parameterization provides a bijective map between full Euclidean metrics and metric fluctuations about a fixed background. For the case of foliatable manifolds, we show how to parameterize fluctuations in order to preserve foliatability of all configurations. Moreover, we show explicitly that preserving the signature on the configuration space for the Lorentzian quantum gravitational path integral is most conveniently achieved by inequality constraints. We discuss the implementation of these inequality constraints in a non-perturbative renormalization group setup.

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arXiv2021

String Tension between de Sitter vacua and Curvature Corrections

Higher-derivative corrections to cosmological effective actions in string theory are largely constrained by T-duality, but have been computed hitherto only to the first few orders in the string scale $α'$. The functional renormalization group, in conjunction with the strong constraints imposed by T-duality, allows to derive cosmological effective actions to all orders in $α'$ while avoiding "truncations" of the theory space. We show that the resulting higher-derivative $α'$-corrections forbid the existence of de Sitter vacua, at least in regimes where string-loop corrections can be neglected. Our findings thus support the implications of the no-de Sitter swampland conjecture in the presence of all-order effects in $α'$.

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