Falk Hassler (IFT)
How Strings May Heal the Fabric of Cosmos
Over the last years, we could witness stunning experimental evidence for the existence of black holes. At the singularity in their centre, gravitational forces are so strong that they even rip spacetime apart. Our conventional approach to gravity, general relativity, fails here and must be replaced by a new framework. Substituting point particles by extended strings is a potential cure. However, it is currently not feasible to obtain direct conclusions from this idea and explain what happens at the singularity. To rectify this situation, I show how four different arenas of string theory (dualities, geometry, supergravity, and integrability) are secretly governed by one central concept, Generalised Homogeneous Spaces (GHS). They are the string's version of homogeneous spaces with a remarkable variety of new properties. I summarise my current efforts to incorporate their quantum corrections due to the extended nature of the string and how they eventually should resolve singularities in black holes or cosmology.