This year's Chilean school on gravitation took place in Concepción, from 4-8 January, focused on black holes and solitons. One of the invited lecturers was Gr@v member C. Herdeiro, delivering a five lectures course on "Asymptotically flat black holes with scalar hair in four spacetime dimensions."
Abstract: Spontaneous scalarization is a scenario in some scalar-tensor theories of gravity where non-perturbative (order-of-unity strength) scalar fields can develop near neutron stars.
Exactly one hundred years after Einstein's completion of the general theory of relativity, Gr@v gathered some collaborators and friends to celebrate Gr@vity!
Pedro Cunha did his undergraduate in Physics and M.Sc in Astrophysics, both at the University of Coimbra. His M.Sc. thesis was already done within Gr@v under the supervision of C. Herdeiro. Pedro is pursuing his Ph.D. studies at the University of Aveiro and IST-Lisbon.
Abstract: I will give an overview of the program to use AdS/CFT techniques to explore the classical and quantum dynamics near cosmological singularities.
Abstract: Inverse scattering theory is a final step of the well known inverse scattering transform method. It does not represent difficulties in 1+1 models but becomes much more complicated for 1+2 models.
Abstract: The recent discovery of the accelerated cosmic expansion suggests that our universe may be endowed with a positive cosmological constant Λ. In addition, even though general relativity (GR) is a very successful and well-tested theory, it could be that it is not the final theory of gravity. Brans-Dicke theory is the one of the first and simplest modifications of Einstein’s theory. In this seminar, I will present the study of cosmic structures in Brans-Dicke like scalar-tensor theories in the presence of a positive cosmological constant. I will discuss the validity of the no-hair theorem in the context of such theories. Moreover, I will show that, the black hole solutions in these theories are no different from those in GR and also that the presence of a stationary cosmological event horizon rules out any regular spherical stationary solution, appropriate for the description of a star.
Our group coordinated the "Numerical Relativity and High Energy Physics" IRSES network (2012-2015). Here is a list of the global network meetings organized: