From Bohm to Bekenstein: Explorations in Quantum Foundations and Quantum Gravity

ABSTRACT

In this talk I will summarize two research directions in the broad fields of quantum foundations and quantum gravity, comprising part of my Ph.D. thesis completed at the University of Queensland. In the first half, I will discuss an extension of Bohmian mechanics to relativistic regimes, grounding the deterministic trajectories of photons in weak measurements. In the second half, I will discuss how to operationally construct a black hole in a superposition of masses, showing how a first-quantized system can "detect" signatures of a discretisation in its spectrum in accordance with Bekenstein's seminal conjecture about black holes in quantum gravity.

[1] J. Foo, E. Asmodelle, A.P. Lund, T.C. Ralph, Nature Comms. 13, 4002 (2022).

[2] J. Foo, C.S. Arabaci, M. Zych, R.B. Mann, Phys. Rev. Lett. 129, 18 (2022).

BIOGRAPHY

Joshua is a new postdoctoral fellow in Igor Pikovski's group working on atomic sensing and error correction. He is also a recent recipient of the Banting postdoctoral fellowship (Canada). He recently completed his Ph.D. in quantum foundations and field theory at the University of Queensland under the supervision of Prof. Tim Ralph and Dr. Magdalena Zych. His research interests range from topics in theoretical quantum optics, low energy quantum gravity, and the quantum features of spacetime.