Touring the Planck Scale

Dr. Piero Nicolini, Ph.D., is a German-Italian theoretical physicist, currently Senior Researcher at the University of Trieste and Adjunct Professor at the Goethe University Frankfurt. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Bologna in 2002 and his German ``Habilitation'' in 2013, as well as two other habilitations in Italy, in theoretical physics and astrophysics. Prior to his current position in Trieste, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Theoretical Physics in Marseille, Visiting Scholar at the California State University in Fresno, Research Fellow and Head of the Classical and Quantum Gravity Group at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, and Visiting Associate Professor at New York University Abu Dhabi. He has also been an invited researcher at several research institutes and universities around the world, including MIT, Columbia University, CERN, and the Perimeter Institute.

Over the course of his career, Professor Nicolini has supervised more than twenty graduate students and authored more than fifty peer-reviewed journal articles on quantum gravity, string theory, and theoretical particle physics. He has also edited seven monographs, including two books published by Springer as proceedings of the Karl Schwarzschild Meetings, a legendary series of conferences on classical and quantum gravity that attracted an unprecedented high quality of speakers, including Nobel laureates.

Professor Nicolini is perhaps best known for his seminal publications in black hole physics, where he proposed non-commutative geometry as a tool for drawing a consistent scenario of black hole evaporation beyond the Hawking semiclassical limit. Based on his highly cited papers, he has been ranked in the top 2% of world scientists and inducted into the list of top Italian scientists. He has also received a significant number of research grants and awards, including the Carl Wilhelm Fück Prize of the Walter Greiner Society for Research in Fundamental Physics, Frankfurt, Germany.

His current research focuses on the spontaneous dimensional reduction of the universe and, more generally, on the phenomena expected to have occurred soon after the Big Bang.

Introduction.- The issue of fundamental interactions.- Life and work of Antonio Aurilia.- The Physics from the electroweak to the Planck scale.- Particle sectors beyond the Standard Model.- Noncommutative and nonlocal quantum field theory.- Supergravity, superstrings and quantum gravity.- Evaporating black holes and black hole thermodynamics.- Quantum pregeometry and Planckian black holes.- Analogue gravity systems.- Higher dimensional spacetimes and terascale quantum gravity.- Dimensionally reduced Universe and Planck time cosmology.- Future perspectives.- Summary of the proposed results and potential developments.- Experimental observations in the near future.- Final remarks and conclusions.Contributors: Robert Balbinot (Bologna U. & INFN, Bologna), Patricio Gaete (CCTVal, Valparaiso & Santa Maria U., Valparaiso), José A. Helayël-Neto (Rio de Janeiro, CBPF), Robert Mann (Waterloo U. & Perimeter Inst. Theor. Phys.), Jonas Mureika (LMU, Los Angeles), Hermann Nicolai (Potsdam, MaxPlanck Inst.), Douglas Singleton (Fresno State), Anais Smailagic (INFN, Trieste), Euro Spallucci (Trieste U. & INFN, Trieste), Paul K. Townsend (Cambridge U., DAMPT).