Shining X-rays on asymptotically safe quantum gravity
Biao Zhou, Askar B. Abdikamalov, Dimitry Ayzenberg, Cosimo Bambi, Sourabh Nampalliwar, Ashutosh Tripathi
Abstract
Asymptotically safe quantum gravity is a promising candidate scenario to provide a UV extension for the effective quantum field theory of Einstein's gravity. The theory has its foundations on the very successful framework of quantum field theory, which has been extensively tested for electromagnetic and nuclear interactions. However, observational tests of asymptotically safe quantum gravity are more challenging. Recently, a rotating black hole metric inspired by asymptotically safe quantum gravity has been proposed, and this opens the possibility of astrophysical tests of the theory. In the present paper, we show the capabilities of X-ray reflection spectroscopy to constrain the inverse dimensionless fixed-point value $\gamma$ from the analysis of a Suzaku observation of the X-ray binary GRS 1915+105. We compare these constraints with those obtained from black hole imaging.