Below you can find a list of my publications in reverse chronological order. Links to the respective PDFs can be found on my InspireHEP page.

For the layperson, I’ve also provided a shortest justifiable summary of what we did.

I am forever grateful to my collaborators over the years. In surname alphabetical order (as is standard in theoretical physics): Eugeny Babichev, Christos Charmousis, Sotirios Karamitsos, Dieter Lüst, Joaquin Masias, Antonio Padilla, Paul Saffin, Ippocratis Saltas, and Marco Scalisi.

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From Frame Covariance to the Swampland Distance Conjecture

Particles—understood as ripples in fields—secretly encode an abstract kind of geometry known as field space. Subtle things happen when you add gravity to the mix: just as you may have heard that gravity curves space and time, it also curves this geometry where the fields live.

We develop a new language to unpack this interplay between gravity and field-space geometry and use it to revisit some well-known conjectures in quantum gravity. Interestingly, our results suggest that they might not have much to do with quantum gravity after all.

Do we live on the End of the World?

The “End of the World” is a strange object, motivated by quantum gravity, that marks the ending of all space and time. ‘Nothing’ lies beyond. Could our universe be the End of the World? We show that an inhabitant would observe an accelerating expanding spacetime, just like our own universe. Along the way we show that ‘nothing’ (as in ‘no space nor time’) can be thought of as an infinitely curved spacetime. Wild.

Horndeski speed tests with scalar-photon couplings

There are mind-boggling tight constraints on the speed of light () vs. speed of gravitational waves (); they are the same to one part in . Some people found a set of theories where , but where the speeds themselves can do all sorts of crazy stuff. We show that this find is not so surprising: you can generate these theories by disformal transformations, which leave the ratio fixed.

Starobinsky inflation in the swampland

Starobinsky inflation has historically been one of our most successful (and simplest!) models to explain the accelerated expansion of our infant universe. We argue that it is at odds with some fundamental expectations for what makes a “good theory” that is consistent with quantum gravity. This places it in the so-called swampland of incompatible theories.