The first global meeting of the COST Action ”CA 16104 Gravitational waves, black holes and fundamental physics (GWverse)” took place in Malta, Gravity@Malta2018 (22-25 January 2018). The meeting brought together three normally disjoint communities, namely Gravitational Wave detection and analysis, BH modeling (in both astrophysical and GR contexts), and strong-gravity tests of fundamental physics.
A team from Aveiro University composed by Tatiana Costa (Aveiro Research Support Office), Nikolai Sobolev and Carlos Herdeiro (both RISE projects coordinator from the Aveiro Physics Department) was present in the RISE coordinator's day at the head of REA (Research Executive Agency) in Brussels, in 18-19 January 2018. The photo shows the RISE coordinators of the Math/Physics panel with REA staff, including Project Officer Amanda Jane Ozin-Hofsaess and the Head of Unit Fredrik Olsson Hector.
The fourth general assembley of the Portuguese Relativity and Gravitation Society (SPRG) ellected the following new officers: C. Herdeiro (president), J. Natário (vice-president), V. Cardoso (Treasurer), J. Lemos (General Assembley President), F. Mena (First Secretary), J. Costa (Second secretary). These officers appear in the above photograph presenting the 2017 Alberto Prize to M. Zilhão. The remaining officer is J. Rocha ("Fiscal Único").
The X Black Holes workshop took place at Aveiro University on 18-19 December 2017. It gathered almost 100 scientists discussing black holes from many different perspectives. Besides 63 oral communications, the workshop also included the fourth General Assembley of the Portuguese Relativity and Gravitation Society (SPRG) and a special session celebrating the 60th anniversary of Prof. J. S. Lemos.
The kick off meeting of the FunFiCO RISE project took place on December 20th at Aveiro University. This is a Marie Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchange partnership between Aveiro University (coordinator), Sheffield University (UK), UFPa (Brazil), UNAM (Mexico) and Valencia University (Spain).
Gr@v members P. Cunha and C. Herdeiro visited Kindai University in Osaka, Japan, hosted by Prof. Akihiro Ishibashi, within a Marie Curie RISE partnership that includes both Aveiro U. and Kindai U. (StronGrHEP project). The photo shows a delightful dinner with collegues from Osaka City University, including Hideki Hishihara, Ken-ichi Nakao and Hirotaka Yoshino.
Gr@v members P. Cunha and C. Herdeiro were amongst the participants of the 27th workshop on General Relativity and Gravitation in Japan (JGRG 27). Herdeiro was one of the invited speakers.
Five of the ground-breaking gravitational wave detections by the LIGO/Virgo collaboration have been interpreted as black hole collisions forming a more massive black hole. It is hard to demonstrate conclusively that these objects are indeed black holes, and there is a lively debate on the intriguing possibility that other, more exotic alternatives could explain the observations. In an article published in Physical Review Letters, Gr@v members P. Cunha and C.
The Higgs vacuum is a metastable state with lifetime longer than the age of the universe, but the vacuum can be destabilised by microscopic black hole seeds. The nucleation process is a nice example of black hole thermodynamics.
Alexandre Pombo successfully finished his Physics M.Sc. at Aveiro University, on October 10th 2017, by defending a thesis with title "Q-balls spectroscopy and construction of boson stars". This thesis was supervised by Gr@v researchers and examined by Prof. Yves Brihaye, from the University of Mons, Belgium. Well done Alexandre!