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 kick off meeting of the RISE network StronGrHEP, took place on May 12th-13th 2016, in the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris. Photo: the coordinates of the five European nodes, C. Herdeiro, E. Barausse, U. Sperhake, V. Cardoso and L. Gualtieri by the statue of the great Urbain Le Verrier.
The ceremony for distinguising the recipients of the 2015 Gulbenkian Prizes for Stimulus of Research, took place on March 9th 2016, at the Gulbenkian Foundation, in Lisbon. Pedro Cunha was awarded one of the prizes for his project on "Black Hole Shadows".
In 2014, it was found that black hole (BH) solutions in General Relativity exist in stationary equilibrium with (good) matter: hairy BHs. An investigation published in Physical Review Letters shows, in a toy model, that analogous hairy BHs can form dynamically.
Here, the numerical data described in the paper "Kerr black holes with Proca hair", arXiv:1603.02687 [gr-qc] [1], is made available for public use.
Gr@v's Ph.D. student Mengjie Wang successfully defended his doctoral thesis with title "Quantum and classical aspects of scalar and vector fields around black holes", on February 29th 2016. Mengjie integrated the MAP-Fis Ph.D. programme and was supported by a grant from the IDPASC doctoral programme. Congratulations Mengjie!
The 2015 paper highlights of the International Journal of Modern Physics D, includes the paper "Asymptotically flat black holes with scalar hair: a review" by Gr@v researchers C. Herdeiro and E. Radu.
The annuncement about the detection of gravitational waves got the attention of Portuguese media, with some contributions from our group:
Interview in Jornal 2, 11th February 2016
On February 11th 2016, the LIGO collaboration announced the first direct detection of gravitational waves. Our group warmly congratulates LIGO for this extraordinary achievement, which opens up access to a new layer of the physical reality!
A new textbook on "Quantum Mechanics", in portuguese, for undergraduate (typically third year) students, has just been released by the Aveiro University publisher, authored by Gr@v member C. Herdeiro.
The book is complemented by recorded lectures and problem classes, the latter given by Gr@v member João Rosa, which can be found here.
Gr@v researchers have found that there are only two equilibrium possibilities for the spin of black hole binaries, and that they are similar to the equilibria observed for the spin of the Moon, which was identified by Giovanni Domenico Cassini in 1693. The results were published this week in MNRAS Letters.