New horizons for gravity: from theoretical cosmology to observational astrophysics
Semester program: February - May 2018 at the Institute for Theoretical Studies ETH Zurich
We want to dedicate an entire semester to the tenacious questions of modern cosmology. The program will aim at exploring new horizons in gravity and cosmology, from recently emerged theoretical frameworks and their connection to the underlying fundamental physics to the associated observational signatures.
Workshops
1) Effective field theory approaches to gravity
05 - 07.03.2018 at ETH-ITS, seminar room, Clausiusstrasse 47
The goal of this workshop is to provide a venue to compare various recently proposed ways of studying effective field theory approaches to gravity.
Key Speakers: Cliff Burgess, Thibault Damour, John Donoghue, Jürg Fröhlich, Cesar Gomez, Karol Kampf, Subodh Patil, Sergey Sibiryakov, Enrico Trincherini, Christof Wetterich
Picture Gallery
2) Gravitational waves in modified gravity
28 - 30.05.2018 at ETH-ITS, seminar room, Clausiusstrasse 47
The goal of this workshop is to extensively exploit the new observational channel of gravitational waves to test the validity of General Relativity and put new effects of modified gravity on trial.
Key Speakers: Luc Blanchet, Diego Blas, David Langlois, Lucas Lombriser, Michele Maggiore, Paolo Pani, Ira Rothstein, Ulrich Sperhake, Leo Stein, Shinji Tsujikawa, Helvi Witek
Picture Gallery
Colloquia
Paul J. Steinhardt, "Big Bang vs. Big Bounce", 22.02.2018
Matthias Bartelmann, "A new theory for old cosmic structures", 29.03.2018
Robert Wald, “Black Holes, Thermodynamics, and Information Loss”, 26.04.2018
Thanu Padmanabhan, “Gravity, the information content of spacetime and the cosmological constant”, 17.05.2018
Other Activities
Seminar at ETH Hönggerberg
Speaker: Claudia de Rham
Time: 06.04. at 9:30, Hönggerberg HIT J 43.1
Title: How light is gravity?
Abstract: The recent direct detections of gravitational waves represent a direct manifestation of the propagating degrees of freedom of gravity. While the recent detections have been successfully used to examine the basic properties of these gravitational degrees of freedom and set an upper bound on its mass and constrain its speed of propagation with unprecedented accuracy, I will explore the possibility for this mass to be sufficiently small to pass current tests of gravity and yet sufficiently large to have deep potential implications on our observable Universe.
Visits
There will be a number of long-term visitors throughout the program, related to the themes of the workshops as well as to the areas of vector-tensor theories, Born-Infeld inspired cosmology and non-linear structure formation.
Anticipated visitors: Matthias Bartelmann, Jose Beltran, Claudia de Rham, Tomi Koivisto, Scott Melville, Andrew Tolley, Shinji Tsujikawa
Organizers: L. Heisenberg, J. Noller, R. Brandenberger, G. Felder and A. Refregier.