Interdependence: Being Reformed by Students with Disabilities

Throughout my career in special education, I have reconsidered my beliefs about disability. As I have transitioned from a special educator to a teacher trainer in India to an assistant professor in a Christian college, I have looked beyond limitations and deficits of my students to see individual uniqueness. In this article, I share my lived experience of people with severe special needs ministering to me in India, explore the lived experiences of other disability advocates, and describe the implications this has for my teaching at a Christian college

An asymptotically safe guide to quantum gravity and matter

Asymptotic safety generalizes asymptotic freedom and could contribute to understanding physics beyond the Standard Model. It is a candidate scenario to provide an ultraviolet extension for the effective quantum field theory of gravity through an interacting fixed point of the Renormalization Group. Recently, asymptotic safety has been established in specific gauge-Yukawa models in four dimensions in perturbation theory, providing a starting point for asymptotically safe model building. Moreover, an asymptotically safe fixed point might even be induced in the Standard Model under the impact of quantum fluctuations of gravity in the vicinity of the Planck scale. This review contains an overview of the key concepts of asymptotic safety, its application to matter and gravity models, exploring potential phenomenological implications and highlighting open questions.Comment: minor changes, references added; version identical with published on

Can we see quantum gravity? Photons in the asymptotic-safety scenario

In the search for a quantum theory of gravity it is crucial to find experimental access to quantum gravitational effects. Since these are expected to be very small at observationally accessible scales it is advantageous to consider processes with no tree-level contribution in the Standard Model, such as photon-photon scattering. We examine the implications of asymptotically safe quantum gravity in a setting with extra dimensions for this case, and point out that various near-future photon-collider setups, employing either electron or muon colliders, or even a purely laser-based setup, could provide a first observational window into the quantum gravity regime.Comment: 29 pages, 9 figures, matches journal version in JHE

Driven anisotropic diffusion at boundaries: noise rectification and particle sorting

We study the diffusive dynamics of a Brownian particle in proximity of a flat surface under non-equilibrium conditions, which are created by an anisotropic thermal environment with different temperatures being active along distinct spatial directions. By presenting the exact time-dependent solution of the Fokker-Planck equation for this problem, we demonstrate that the interplay between anisotropic diffusion and hard-core interaction with the plain wall rectifies the thermal fluctuations and induces directed particle transport parallel to the surface, without any deterministic forces being applied in that direction. Based on current micromanipulation technologies, we suggest a concrete experimental set-up to observe this novel noise-induced transport mechanism. We furthermore show that it is sensitive to particle characteristics, such that this set-up can be used for sorting particles of different size.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure. Supplemental Material provided as a separate pdf file, see ancillary fil

Top mass from asymptotic safety

We discover that asymptotically safe quantum gravity could predict the top-quark mass. For a broad range of microscopic gravitational couplings, quantum gravity could provide an ultraviolet completion for the Standard Model by triggering asymptotic freedom in the gauge couplings and bottom Yukawa and asymptotic safety in the top-Yukawa and Higgs-quartic coupling. We find that in a part of this range, a difference of the top and bottom mass of approximately $170\, \rm GeV$ is generated and the Higgs mass is determined in terms of the top mass. Assuming no new physics below the Planck scale, we construct explicit Renormalization Group trajectories for Standard Model and gravitational couplings which link the transplanckian regime to the electroweak scale and yield a top pole mass of $M_\text{t,pole} \approx 171\, \rm GeV$.Comment: Matches version accepted in Phys. Lett. B; counting of degrees of freedom in Eq.(7) changed, resulting in M_t=171 GeV and M_h=132 GeV; conclusions unchange