ICREA-ICCUB researcher R. Emparan has been awarded an Advanced Grant by the European Research Council (ERC) for his project A New Strategy for Gravity and Black Holes in the 2015 call. The call received close to 2000 applications. The success rate in this call has not been announced yet, but in the previous call it was only 8.5%. The funding is up to 2.5 million Euros per grant and lasts up to five years.
The ERC Advanced Grants are part of the European Union Research and Innovation programme Horizon 2020. They are designed for established and world leading researchers to pursue ground-breaking, high-risk projects in Europe.
R. Emparan has been ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona since 2003, and a member of ICCUB since its creation in 2006. He carries out research in gravitation and cosmology, trying to understand the nature of spacetime at its most fundamental level. Particularly, he studies the classical and quantum aspects of gravity and its most basic objects: the black holes.
General Relativity — Einstein’s theory of gravity — encompasses a huge variety of physical phenomena and provides the basis to our understanding of the Universe and its evolution at the largest scales. Black holes play a central role in this theory. However, their equations are exceedingly hard to solve. The awarded project led by R. Emparan is aimed at developing a novel approach to solve black hole physics by using the number of dimensions D as a perturbation parameter.
Specifically, the project pursuits two major goals: reformulating General Relativity and Black Hole physics around the large-D limit in terms of an effective membrane theory of black holes, coupled to an effective theory for gravitational radiation, and solving several problems in gravitational physics, in particular those of direct relevance to cosmic censorship and of the quantum theory of black holes. With the new tools a large number of additional problems in black hole physics and in holographic duality may be solved, such as black hole collisions, black hole phase diagrams, instabilities, holographic dynamics of finite-temperature systems, and potentially any problem that can be formulated in an arbitrary number of dimensions.
