Gr@v is a team of researchers, based at the Mathematics and Physics Department of Aveiro University, Portugal, working on strong gravity and high energy physics. The group was established in 2010. In January 2015 Gr@v integrated the FCT funded CIDMA research unit (UIDB/04106/2020 and UIDP/04106/2020), as the Gravitational Geometry and Dynamics research group. The group scientific coordinator is C. Herdeiro.
The first "Alberto" prize, awarded to a young researcher in the area of General Relativity by the SPRG was presented in the IX Black Holes Workshop to Jorge Rocha, currently at the University of Barcelona. The award is a hologram of an image of Albert Einstein, which was produced by Pedro Pombo and Emanuel Santos, at the U. Aveiro.
Gr@v member Carlos Herdeiro was one of the invited speakers of the 5th UTQuest workshop, with the theme "Hidden Sector Physics and Cosmophysics", that took place at the Yukawa Insitute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan.
Gr@v's Ph.D. student (in collaboration with IST-Lisbon) Pedro Cunha produced a short movie illustrating a voyage into a black hole, and in particular the lensing effects visualized by an observer undergoing such journey. The journalist Catarina Lázaro (voice) and Gr@v researcher C. Herdeiro (scientific advising) collaborated in the movie, which will have a premiere on December 3rd 2016 at "Observatório Geofísico e Astronómico da Universidade de Coimbra".
Can a black hole have a cube-like horizon (with round edges) or any of the other shapes above? The article "Static Einstein-Maxwell black holes with no spatial isometries in AdS space", by Gr@v member C. Herdeiro and E. Radu, published in Physical Review Letters, shows that it can.
Anti-de-Sitter (AdS) space gives yet another example of how special "standard" black holes are.
The European Space Agency (ESA) Advanced Concepts Team (ACT) has created a cool interactive webpage for visualization of the lensing due to a black hole, featuring black holes with scalar hair found by our group. Try it here! (Works better with the Chrome browser)
The proceedings of the third Amazonian Symposium on Physics, held in Belém, Brazil (28th Sep - 2nd Oct 2015), have been published as a special issue of IJMPD. This meeting closed the successful NRHEP Marie Curie action (2012-2015), coordinated by our group, and the proceedings are edited by the action's node coordinators.
The article "Warm Little Inflaton", co-authored by Gr@v member João G. Rosa and collaborators Mar Bastero-Gil (Granada U.), Arjun Berera (Edinburgh U.) and Rudnei O. Ramos (U.E. Rio de Janeiro) has been published in Physical Review Letters and selected as one of the Editors' Suggestions (a distinction given to about 1 in 6 papers).
Jorge Delgado successfully finished his Physics M.Sc. at Aveiro University, on September 20th 2016, by defending a thesis with title "Kerr black holes with electric charge and scalar hair". This thesis was supervised by Gr@v researchers and examined by Prof. Filipe Mena, from the University of Minho. Well done Jorge!
Gr@v's PhD student Helgi Runarsson was awarded a Hartle Award for the best talk by a student in his GR21 session (A1). The award consists of a small money prize, a 3-year membership in the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation, and a certificate.
The 20th National Meeting of the Portuguese Physics Society (SPF) took place at the University of Minho, in Braga, in the 8-9 September 2016. Gr@v member C. Herdeiro was one of the invited plenary speakers.