Alexandre Correia, Professor at Coimbra University, ended his term as scientific coordinator of the Gravitational Geometry and Dynamics Group (informally dubbed Gr@v) of CIDMA on 16 December 2019. Prof. Correia will cease to be a full member of CIDMA at the end of 2019 by virtue of his move to Coimbra University. The group is very grateful for his leadership. The new elected scientific coordinator is Carlos Herdeiro.
A recent result by Gr@v members, published in Physical Review Letters, was highlighted in a feature article at phys.org. See the article here.
On December 11th 2019, Gr@v member João Rosa gave an outreach talk on the part of the 2019 Nobel Physics Prize awarded for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology to James Peebles.
In this talk, we show how the swampland conjecture, which has
recently been attracting attention in string theory and gravity
theory, relates to the slow-roll condition of inflation. First, we
will briefly explain the reason why we focus on the swampland
conjecture to investigate the dynamics of inflation. Next, we discuss
Professor Péter Forgács from the University of Tours (France) visited Gr@v and presented a seminar on "Non-linear eigenmodes of asymptotically Anti-de-Sitter space".
Gr@v and MAP-PDMA Ph.D. student João Oliveira was awareded an "Outstanding Presentation Award - Gold Prize" for his scientific presentation at the 29th workshop on General Relativity and Gravitation, in Japan, at the University of Kobe.
More than 200 researchers participated in this conference, of which 66 were selected to deliver oral presentations. Of these, 56 were nominated for the outstanding presentation award, but only 4 were awarded this distinction, including João Oliveira.
Grigoris Panotopoulos, from IST-Lisbon, visited Gr@v on 28-29 November to discuss tidal Love numbers of compact objects.
The V Amazonian Symposium on Physics was held in Belém, Brazil, from 18-22 November 2019. This meeting was co-sponsored by the Marie Curie RISE FunFiCO network and co-organised by Gr@v members. The invited speakers included Bill Unruh, Bob Wald, John Friedman, Jorge Zanelli and Mirjam Cvetic, amongst others.
Gra@v members C. Herdeiro and E. Radu, together with Nuno Santos from IST-Lisbon, visited Universidade Federal do Pará (UFPa), Brazil, in Amazonia, during November 2019, within the Marie Curie RISE FunFiCO partnership. In the photon in the river Guamá, with Carolina Benone, a former UFPa/Aveiro PhD student, now staff at UFPa.