On the corpuscular theory of gravity

Abstract

The aim of this work is to provide a general description of the corpuscular theory of gravity. After reviewing some of the major conceptual issues emerging from the semiclassical and field theoretic approaches to Einstein’s gravity, we present a synthetic overview of two novel (and extremely intertwined) perspectives on quantum mechanical effects in gravity: the horizon quantum mechanics (HQM) formalism and the classicalization scheme. After this preliminary discussion, we then proceed with implementing the latter to several different scenarios, namely self-gravitating systems, the early Universe, and galactic dynamics. Concerning the first scenario, we start by describing the generation of the Newtonian potential as the result of a coherent state of toy (scalar) gravitons. After that we employ this result to study some features of the gravitational collapse and to argue that black holes can be thought of a self-sustained quantum states, at the critical point, made of a large number of soft virtual gravitons. We then refine this simplified analysis by constructing an effective theory for the gravitational potential of a static spherical symmetric system up to the first post-Newtonian correction. Additionally, we employ the HQM formalism to study the causal structure emerging from the corpuscular scenario. Finally, we present a short discussion of corpuscular black holes in lower dimensional spaces. After laying down the basics of corpuscular black holes, we present a generalization of the aforementioned arguments to cosmology. Specifically, we first introduce a corpuscular interpretation of the de Sitter spacetime. Then we use it as the starting point for a corpuscular formulation of the inflationary scenario and to provide an alternative viewpoint on the dark components of the [Formula: see text]CDM model. The key message of this work is that the corpuscular theory of gravity offers a way to unify most of the experimental observations (from astrophysical to galactic and cosmological scales) in a single framework, solely based on gravity and baryonic matter.