GR21 @ Columbia + Workshop @ Caltech

In academia, summer is the period to attend conferences and workshops, since the term is over (typically between May and June, depending on the country) and researchers do not have teaching duties at this time. 

This year I attended the GR21 Conference at Columbia University in NYC, the biggest event (organized every 3 years) that brings together scientists working in all aspects of General Relativity. 

I was not super happy with attending this conference, since the conference fee (~$600) and the cost of staying in NYC were much higher than usual (GR20 was held in Warsaw and conference fee was about half the price). However, in this very special and exciting year for General Relativity, I couldn't miss this conference. Attending it, in fact, turned out to be a very good choice: the conference was great, I had the chance to discuss with a lot of colleagues and I've particularly enjoyed the talks at the parallel sessions. I gave two talks, one presenting the recent work discussed here at the Special Gravitational Wave Session, and another on tidal deformations at the Parallel Session on Perturbation Theory in General Relativity. 

The slides of my talks are available here and here, respectively, whereas some nice pics from the event can be found here; I'm not in any of them, though, so I took this one myself:

Heading to the morning plenary session (hence the sleepy face) at Columbia campus

The GR conferences are organized by The International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation, ISGRG. During the GR21 conference, Prof. Eric Poisson was elected new President of ISGRG and the venue for GR22 in 2019 was decided (it's going to be in Valencia).

After the conference, I went to Boston for a short visit and then flew to LA to attend the workshop "Unifying Tests of General Relativity", organized by Leo Stein and other members of the Caltech in Pasadena, CA.

After a conference like GR21 (where one passes most of the time scattering off the 600+ participants, chatting and discussing projects for which one usually doesn't even have the time to sit down and think about) attending a small workshop (~40 participants, most of which friends and long-standing colleagues) like the one at Caltech was really a relief. I've never been on the West Coast and Pasadena is a lovely town, everyone seems relaxed and I had time to sit down and talk to collaborators I usually see in person just a few times per year. Science-wise, the workshop was excellent in many aspects, and I left Caltech really excited and looking forwards to working again on some new projects (if any, this is probably the best outcome of a successful workshop!) Some pictures of the event can be found here and below:

Group photo next to the Keck Center at Caltech

Me discussing with Nico Yunes and Vitor Cardoso about our recent work on GW ringdown

I managed to break my glasses on the very first day of the workshop. The secretary was a a DIY-type lady and helped me fixing them. 
This was the result.... [pic taken by Thomas Sotiriou]

Meetings in Lisboa

Right before Christmas I visited Lisbon to attend a conference and a workshop held at the Instituto Superior Técnico. It was a great opportunity to come back to Portugal after almost one year and meet a lot of friends and colleagues there.

TAUP 2015 or On my first international conference

Mr. What and Mr. Why

Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics (TAUP), is an international biennal conference arrived at its XIV edition. It covers topics from cosmology and particle physics, to trans dark matter and neutrino physics and to continue with high energy astrophysics, cosmic rays and gravitational waves. Theoretical perspectives as well as experimental strategies and developments are included.

TAUP is born at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) and we are equal in
age, besides that, because of the biennal frequency, it is a sparkling teenager. About me, well...  I am already a PhD student and I have attended the conference with a nice group of colleagues.

Workshop + Conference @ The Fields Institute

"The year of the 100th anniversary of the formulation of Einstein's General Relativity will be remembered as the least productive one for the general-relativity community."

This is what I've heard more than once during the time spent at The Fields Institute in Toronto these weeks :-)
The Institute is organizing a long Focus Program to celebrate the centenary of one of Einstein's greatest achievements, the formulation of a relativistic theory of gravitational interactions, General Relativity for short.

The reason for the pessimist statement above is that this is only one of the numerous events that have been organized around the world to celebrate this important discovery. Now that the term ended, scientists are more free to travel to conferences and workshops and, to save time and money, it's very common to go directly from one conference to another on the week after. This does not leave too much time to sit down and do "actual" work.

Last week I've attended a very interesting workshop on Perturbation Theory which was organized here at the Field Institute as part of the Focus Program. This week instead the Institute is hosting a conference on Black Holes which ends today. Speakers at the conference included Clifford Will, Saul Teukolsky, Robert Wald, Eric Poisson, Gary Horowitz and William Unruh, to mention a few. Personally, I found the workshop much more stimulating and useful than the conference, but it's certainly suggestive to take the opportunity to discuss with some of the fathers of modern General Relativity.

This coming summer will be very busy with other events, especially in July and August, so I tend to agree that year 2015 will not be the most fruitful one in terms of actual work done.

On the other hand, do not underestimate the importance for the community to gather together and discuss open problems and (possibly) crazy ideas! Peer discussion and new collaborations are at the core of the scientific process and they are a crucial part of the duties of any scientist.  For this reason I am positive that the discussions and the collaborations that originate during these meetings will certainly contribute to solve open problems in the field and, who knows, perhaps the next breakthrough is just around the corner in 2016!

Doing a short tour of Toronto with Helvi Witek. Helvi was Ph.D. student in Lisbon when I moved there 4 years ago and she is now postdoc at Cambridge University working on numerical simulations of black-hole systems.

All roads lead to....

I didn't have much time to write lately. The reason is the map below, which shows the places i'll be visiting in the next 45 days... it's going to be a very busy period!

I'm flying tomorrow to Boston for 10 days, then I will attend 3 workshops (in Bremen, Toronto and Lisbon), a friend reunion in Barcelona, a wedding in my home town, Cagliari, and each time touching base in Rome (where all roads lead after all!). I am also co-organizing the NRHEP Meeting and will chair one parallel section at Marcel Grossman Meeting in July. Fortunately, these latter two will not involve any travel, since the venue will be Sapienza for both.

I'll try to report more or less constantly during this crazy schedule, especially from the conferences which looks very interesting and i'm pretty much looking forward to attend.

Tune to Planck

There is quite a hype in the corridors around the upcoming presentation of Planck results.

A press conference is scheduled on Thursday at 10am CET and it will be streamed directly from the ESA Headquarters.

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The Planck space telescope was launched in May 2009 to obtain the most detailed map of the oldest light in the universe, the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Several rumors circulate these days about Planck having found several unexpected features of this radiation, which could drastically change our understanding of the Early Universe.

Needless to say, no semiofficial news leaked so far and there's nothing to do but tuning to the ESA streaming next Thursday!

Poster at the XX SIGRAV Conference

On the 22nd of October I will attend the XX SIGRAV Conference (SIGRAV stands for Italian Society for General Relativity and Gravitation) in Naples and I will present this poster:

here is the pdf

which is done with the baposter package for LaTeX, a great tool to create fancy posters (i mean, fancier than this one). While in Naples, I'll surely write a brief summary on the conference, so stay tuned.

Sparse Swedish Thoughts

• My talk is in a couple of hours, i should finish it instead of writing here
• Stockholm is just amazing: it looks like nobody is really rich and nobody is poor. On average everybody is wealthy enough and the standard deviation is tiny. I guess that's the secret of this country (plus the fact it's just 10 millions people)

"Blond girls... blond girls everywhere"

Tomorrow: Stockholm

There are two huge conferences on gravity: the GR series and the Marcel Grossmann meetings. Every three years, several communities working on gravity, astrophysics and related subjects join these events, with excellent plenary talks and an unbelievable number of parallel sections.

This year, the MG13 will be held in Stockholm, starting from next Sunday. I'm going there tomorrow and will try to keep you posted [not as other contributors of these blog did in the past :P] ....Many interesting events are planned!

more on the 13rd MG meeting here. Next GR conference will be held in Warsaw instead, in July 2013