Dr David Vegh

David Vegh

Senior Lecturer in Theoretical Physics

School of Physical and Chemical Sciences
Queen Mary University of London
www.qmul.ac.uk/spcs/staff/academics/profiles/dvegh.html
Centre for Fundamental Physics

Research

Interests

Our current understanding of Nature is centered around two theories: general relativity which describes classical gravity, and quantum field theory which describes the strong and electroweak interactions and various low-energy phenomena. Naive attempts to unify these two theories lead to insurmountable difficulties. Moreover, a unified theory would ideally explain recent cosmological observations such as the acceleration of the universe, dark matter, and cosmic inflation. Addressing these challenges requires new ideas.

In recent years it has become clear that gravity and quantum physics are not incompatible. On the contrary, they are intimately connected: the emergence of spacetime is thought to be related to the quantum entanglement of degrees of freedom in a “holographic dual” quantum system. However, the nature of this emergence is not fully understood and controlled toy models for emergent gravity would be extremely valuable. The main objective of my current research is to construct such models.

I am also interested in strongly correlated condensed matter systems which have no quasiparticle excitations.