Pietro Dona

Quantum tunneling of quantum geometries

The main challenge for all tentative quantum gravity theories is connecting with the actual world and observable signatures. Predicted corrections to general relativity of first order in ℏ are generally too small to be observed. An alternative is to search for quantum processes forbidden in the classical theory, such as quantum tunneling processes. A concrete realization of spacetime tunneling possibly allowed by quantum gravity is the quantum transition of a black hole to a white hole at the end of the Hawking evaporation. I started working on this research direction very recently and am trying to understand how to characterize the tunneling process in spin foams.

Publications: