News Overview
Index 〉News overview page 〉Show item
We are delighted to announce that STRUCTURES Professor Astrid Eichhorn has secured one of the prestigious ERC Consolidator Grants by the European Research Council (ERC). This highly competitive grant will support her pioneering research into the quantum nature of gravity, enabling her and her team to deepen our understanding of this fundamental aspect of the universe. Over a period of five years, her project will receive two million euros in funding.
Astrid Eichhorn's research focuses on the quantum properties of space-time and the interplay with the fundamental building blocks of the universe, including elementary particles of the Standard Model of particle physics, dark matter and dark energy. In her ERC-funded project “Probing the Quantum Nature of Gravity at All Scales” (ProbeQG) she aims to primarily explore how to test fundamental theories on the quantum structure of space-time through experiments and observations. The central challenge is that the quantum properties of space-time manifest on tiny length scales – about 17 orders of magnitude below the scales that can be directly examined experimentally by the Large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator of the European research center CERN. The main idea of the ProbeQG project is to identify “lever arms”. These are systems that translate the effects of quantum gravity on tiny scales into effects that are experimentally accessible. To this end, Prof. Eichhorn and her team want to build a bridge between the theory of asymptotically safe quantum gravity, particle physics, black hole physics and cosmology.
Astrid Eichhorn is a STRUCTURES Professor at the Institute of Theoretical Physics (ITP), where she is heading the Quantum Gravity group. She completed her PhD at the University of Jena, before she pursued a postdoctoral position at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, and subsequently became a research fellow at Imperial College London. At Heidelberg University she led an Emmy Noether Group on the fundamental quantum structure of space-time and matter from 2016 to 2020. From 2019 she served first as associate professor and from 2023 as full professor at the Centre for Cosmology and Particle Physics Phenomenology at the University of Southern Denmark. In 2024, she returned to Heidelberg, where she was appointed to one of the newly established STRUCTURES Professorships. Prof. Eichhorn's contributions to quantum gravity have earned her recognition as a leading voice in the field.
Further information: