n 14.12.22 – Professor Victor Gorbenko at EPFL’s Institute of Physics (IPHYS) has received a Starting Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation.
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Due to Switzerland’s status as a non-associated third country in the Horizon Europe programme, the federal government mandated the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) to launch the funding scheme “SNSF Starting Grants”. This integrative call is a transitional measure covering the ERC Starting Grants, as well as the former SNSF funding schemes Eccellenza and PRIMA.

Among the 2022 awardees of the SNSF’s Starting Grants is Professor Victor Gorbenko from the Institute of Physics, with his project entitled ‘The Fundamental Description of the Expanding Universe’.

The project aims at developing a theoretical description of the cosmological expansion of the universe. On very large scales our universe is not static, and as far as we can observe it, it has always been growing in size. At the fundamental level this expansion poses challenges to our theories of gravitation, especially when quantum effects come into play. Simply phrased, the main question can be formulated as follows: if the universe is all there is, and if it keeps growing, where does the ”material” of which it is made of keeps coming from? We hope to answer this question using the modern theoretical tools of quantum field theory and quantum gravity.

Official SNSF announcement

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