Emil Mottola
Adjunct Professor of Physics and Astronomy, University of New Mexico. APS Fellow, Division of Gravitational Physics, 2024. Affiliate of the New Mexico Consortium.
I earned my Ph.D. from Columbia University in theoretical physics in 1979, with Norman H. Christ. I was a postdoctoral member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton from 1979 to 1982, then a research fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara from 1982 to 1986. In 1986 I joined the High Energy Physics group T-8 of the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and remained based there until 2021.
I work on particle physics, quantum field theory, non-equilibrium and condensed matter physics, general relativity, cosmology, and the physics of black holes. There are about 100 publications and more than 13,000 citations. The list is on Google Scholar.
My central interest is reconciling Einstein’s classical general relativity, which holds at macroscopic scales, with the quantum Standard Model at the smallest scales. The tension between the two becomes acute in black holes, and in the paradoxes they pose for quantum theory, as Hawking emphasized. The history of physics has shown that focusing on those tensions, when our best tested theories are applied to extreme circumstances, can reveal the hidden assumptions that need to be reexamined.
With Pawel O. Mazur I proposed that black holes are not holes, but gravitational vacuum condensate stars: equally compact, with a physical surface and a non-singular dark energy interior. That proposal has since been developed from quantum effective theory, based on the conformal anomaly and a dynamical theory of vacuum energy, relevant both to gravastars and to cosmological dark energy. The present work is on observational signatures that could distinguish gravastars from black holes in gravitational-wave and multi-messenger astronomy, and on dynamical dark energy in cosmology.
The faculty page is at UNM. Office: PAIS 3314. Email: emottola@unm.edu, mottola.emil@gmail.com.