Semiclassical gravity

Semiclassical gravity is the framework in which spacetime's metric stays a classical field, governed by Einstein's equations with a source term, while the matter fields living on that spacetime are quantized — a deliberate halfway house short of full quantum gravity, where the metric itself would also be quantized. It is the setting for the trace anomaly, Hawking radiation, cosmological particle creation, and the Drummond-Hathrell vacuum-polarization effect, among other results that have no classical analogue.

The vault met this framework through Antonio Ferreiro and Andrea Cavallaro's 2026 preprint (arXiv:2610.10588), which argues that quantizing matter fields in this framework — without touching gravity itself — is enough to break a non-existence theorem Curiel proved classically (claim-ferreiro-cavallaro-2026-qft-renormalization-yields-gravitational-stress-energy-tensor), and builds two further philosophical readings of general relativity on top of that result (claim-ferreiro-cavallaro-2026-metric-gains-material-significance-egalitarian-reading, claim-ferreiro-cavallaro-2026-unificationist-dilemma-matter-spacetime-divide). This is the vault's first claim-note cluster in this specific subfield of physics.

References

• claim-ferreiro-cavallaro-2026-qft-renormalization-yields-gravitational-stress-energy-tensor
• claim-ferreiro-cavallaro-2026-metric-gains-material-significance-egalitarian-reading
• claim-ferreiro-cavallaro-2026-unificationist-dilemma-matter-spacetime-divide
• Capture: 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-09-outside-arxiv261010588-when-quantum-field-theory-kicks-in.md

Log

• 2026-10-11: Page created on promotion of the arXiv:2610.10588 capture — the vault's first contact with semiclassical gravity as a framework.