Touring the Planck Scale: Antonio Aurilia Memorial Volume

This book, dedicated to Antonio Aurilia, provides an overview of one of the most enigmatic fields in theoretical physics: the fundamental interactions at energies ranging from the electroweak scale to the Planck scale. This includes physics beyond the standard model, string theory, p-branes, quantum gravity, quantum black holes, and early universe cosmology. Another goal of this work is to present the physical conditions under which evidence of new physics at extreme energies might be uncovered at current (or near-future) experimental facilities.

The book is organized into three parts. The first part introduces fundamental interaction problems and summarizes Prof. Aurilia’s life and work, including some unpublished material. The second part forms the book’s core, featuring contributions from internationally recognized specialists who collaborated with Prof. Aurilia. The third part summarizes the findings and concludes, with a particular focus on future developments.

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.