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. In January 2025 colleagues from the U. Algarve joined CIDMA and the group.
Our group is participating in the organization of the II Physics Meeting in Amazonia, to take place at Universidade Federal do Pará, Belém, Brazil, from 24-28 November 2014. This is a joint meeting of researchers in various topics including gravitational physics and condensed matter. See a beautiful movie about the meeting here.
C. Herdeiro was the guest interviewee of Porto Canal's "Mentes que Brilham". Watch and listen to the conversation with interviewer Cláudia Fonseca about black holes and some of the research work made at Gr@v in this area.
The seventh edition of the Black Holes Workshop will be held at the University of Aveiro in 18-19 December 2014. These workshops gather researchers working on all aspects of black hole physics/mathematics, and stimulate the interaction between them. More information can be found in the VIIBHW webpage.
Living Reviews in Relativity, a most prestigious, invitation only, review journal on the topic of gravitational physics, with an impact factor of 22.333 (2012), is publishing the review article "Exploring new physics frontiers through numerical relativity", authored by V. Cardoso, L. Gualtieri, C. Herdeiro and U. Sperhake.
Juan Carlos Degollado Daza, who has been a post-doctoral research at Gr@v since 2012, working on numerical relativity, has accepted a permanent professor position at the University of Guadalajara, Mexico. Congratulations Juan Carlos, well done!
The III Amazonian workshop on black holes and analogue models of gravity will take place in UFP, Belém do Pará, Brazil, from 4-7 August 2014. This is a satellite workshop of the IRSES Marie Curie action on "Numerical Relativity and High Energy Physics", of which the U. Aveiro and UFP are both partners.
See the media coverage by the UFPA press here.
The COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) action "Black holes in a violent Universe", in which our group participated, closed with an interdisciplinary conference in Potsdam: "99 years of black holes: from Astronomy to quantum gravity", showing the extraordinary transversality of black holes physics.
The Essay "A new spin on black hole hair", by C. Herdeiro and E. Radu, was selected for an "Honorable Mention" in the Gravity Research Foundation 2014 Awards for Essays on Gravitation. The first prize was awarded to M. Krauss and (Nobel Laureate) F. Wilczek, for the essay "From B-modes to Quantum Gravity and Unification of Forces". See the list of all prized essays here.
"Black holes have no hair" - is a famous `mantra' coined by John Wheeler in 1971, to express that astrophysical black holes should all have very similar physical properties. In a paper to appear in Physical Review Letters, however, Gr@v researchers C. Herdeiro and E. Radu showed that actually astrophysical black holes need not be bald!
Mengjie Wang, Ph.D. student at Gr@v, has received a "Chinese Government Award for outstanding self-financed students abroad", granted by the Ministry of Education of China. Congratulations Mengjie!