QHack 2021 prize for Felipe Freitas
The machine learning work by Gr@v member Felipe Freitas for detecting gravitational waves was awarded a prize of US $4000 in QHack 2021, being ranked in the top 20 amongst over 300 submitted projects.
Strong Gravity News & Events
On the cover of BBC Science Focus
A recent paper co-authored by Gr@v in Physical Review Letters, interpreting GW190521 as a collision of bosonic stars (rather than black holes) was covered in the 17 February 2021 BBC Science Focus issue on dark stars.
C. Herdeiro elected to the EPL Association Board of Directors
Europhysics Letters (EPL) is a reference journal founded in 1986 by the European Physical Society (EPS), the Société Française de Physique (SFP) and its subsidiary EDP Sciences, the Società Italiana di Fisica (SIF) and the Institute of Physics (IOP).
Did LIGO and Virgo observe dark matter?
Gr@v members co-author a paper in Physical Review Letters suggesting GW190521 may be a hint of a new dark matter particle.
Traversable wormholes without exotic matter
Traversable wormholes are intriguing geometries in General Relativity, which have leaked into science fiction becoming known to the general public. Yet, they typically require exotic matter. In a paper in Phys. Rev. Lett., as Editor's suggestion, Gr@v member E. Radu, together with J. Blázquez-Salcedo (Complutense U.) and C. Knoll (U. Oldenburg), have shown how to construct wormholes in General Relativity without the use of exotic matter (or modified gravity).
Top 5%
The paper "Stationary black holes and light rings", by P. Cunha and C. Herdeiro, published in 2020 in Physical Review Letters as Editor's Suggestion, has been placed in the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric.
Experimental Tests and Signatures of Modified and Quantum Gravity
C. Herdeiro was one of the invited speakers of the 740ths WEH Seminar "Experimental Tests and Signatures of Modified and Quantum Gravity", held from 1-5 Feb 2021. The talks of the meeting were recorded and are available here. The page is password protected.
Accretion of scalar hair onto black holes
Speaker
Jamie Bamber (University of Oxford)
Event date
Venue
online (only)
Event type
The behaviour of low mass scalar fields around black holes is of great interest in the context of dark matter models consisting of a massive scalar field (such as the axion) an
CIDMA Meeting 2021
The 2021 CIDMA meeting was held on January 21st 2021, online. Our group was represented by Felipe Freitas who discussed the applicability of machine learning techniques from particle physics and gravitational waves to medical applications. Watch here the talks of the 2021 CIDMA meeting.
Boson stars and their instabilities
Speaker
Nils Siemonsen (Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics)
Event date
Venue
online (only)
Event type
Particle physics models of dark matter, and extensions to the Standard Model, predict the existence of a large abundance of light scalar degrees of freedom in the universe. From a diffuse cloud, these can form into rotating clumps of energy - boson stars.