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, Justin Khoury, Dieter Lüst, Joaquin Masias, Antonio Padilla, Paul Saffin, Ippocratis Saltas, and Marco Scalisi.

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A Lapse in the Cosmological Constant Problem with Bulk Dynamics

In a previous paper we found an almost-too-simple solution to the cosmological constant problem. Here we put it to the test by trying everything we can to break it! Alas, it remains well-behaves and manages to solve the problem.

Dimensional Analysis is a Gauge Theory

“What the hell is a meter?”

This innocent question sent me into something of an existential crisis and, almost by accident, led me to propose an answer century-old question in philosophy of physics. Units are incredibly peculiar; their mathematical foundation have remained surprisingly unsettled for more than a century. I argue that the mathematics of units naturally emerges from the same framework and principles used to describe the fundamental forces of particle physics: gauge theory. This creates a two-way bridge where I use gauge-theoretic tools to address foudnational questions about units, while the familiar language of units offers intuitive analogies for abstract structures and problems in particle physics.

A Lapse in the Cosmological Constant Problem

Vacuum energy is out of control!.. or at least that’s what happens if you try to compute it using quantum field theory coupled to gravity. The inability to tame vacuum energy calculations is one of the greatest long-standing puzzles in fundamental physics, known as the ‘cosmological constant problem’. We found a crazy solution (yes, we actually called it that for almost a year) involving a so-called lapse function, originating from an extra dimension.

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.