She has headed the group “Gravitational theory: Massive spin 2 fields” at the Max Planck Institute for Physics since early October 2017. From there, she attended ETH Zurich for several months as a postdoc on a research residency, before being appointed as an Assistant Professor at LMU in 2016. For this reason the construction of the extended theory needs to avoid the ghost.Īfter her physics degree course at the University of Heidelberg, Angnis Schmidt-May obtained her doctoral degree at the University of Stockholm. When extending the gravitational theory to include a massive particle, an instability (a ghost) is very likely to occur. This describes the interaction of a massive particle with the massless graviton, each being spin-2 particles. Here, she also addresses the question of the impacts the new physical model may have on cosmology.Īt the heart of her research is the so-called “ghost-free bimetric theory”. Schmidt-May and her Group investigate whether an additional, similar particle may exist, but possessing mass. One of the core questions is which particle is involved in gravitation: in contrast to the other fundamental forces in the universe – the electromagnetic, the weak and the strong forces – no gravitational force carrier is known to date.Įinstein's theory describes the putative “graviton” as a massless particle.
Angnis Schmidt-May aims to expand the theory to find answers to unexplained questions on the evolution of the universe.
The new Max Planck Research Group's topic is the gravitational force, described by Albert Einstein 100 years ago in the general theory of relativity and which still holds true today.
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