New Frontiers in Gravitational-Wave Astrophysics @ Sapienza

The workshop "New Frontiers in Gravitational-Wave Astrophysics" that will be held at Sapienza starting from next Monday.

Copyright: Michelangelo feat. coalescence

The list of speakers is impressive, the workshop will bring together leading experts in gravitational-wave astrophysics (the location surely helped attracting a lot of participants!), with the aim of discussing new frontiers, such as formation of black-hole binaries, multiwavelength and multimessenger astronomy, tests of gravity, neutron-star modelling and equation-of-state extraction from gravitational-wave signals.

Today, Valeria Ferrari, Leonardo Gualtieri and I are finally done with the organization, and I finally deserve this:

June in Rome & fresh beer, it could be worse....

Stay tuned for some news about the workshop later this week!

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.

Visit to Shangai

Many things have happened in the last few weeks, including the Centenary of General Relativity. On November 25th, I wanted to write a post on this event, but I couldn't because I was visiting Cosimo Bambi's gravity group at Fudan University in Shangai and, as it is infamously known, Google products (including this webpage) are inaccessible from China. None of the standard workaround really worked for me so, as a part of my Chinese trip, I have experienced how one feels being without access to gmail, google maps, facebook, etc... (it turned out to be not that bad in fact..)

During the visit, we had a mini-workshop with astrophysicists Javier Garcia-Martinez (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA), Thomas Dauser (Erlangen-Nuremberg) and Matt Middleton (Cambridge) who are working on different aspects of the electromagnetic emission from accretion disks as a possible way to measure the black-hole spin.

Shangai's skyline as viewed from one of the skyscrapers of Fudan University. The city is simply ENORMOUS..

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.

Workshop: "Compact Objects as Astrophysical and Gravitational Probes" at the Lorentz Center (Feb 2-6, 2015)

It's a pleasure to advertise the workshop  "Compact Objects as Astrophysical and Gravitational Probes", to be held at the Lorentz Center (Leiden, The Netherlands) from February 2 through February 6.

One version of the workshop's poster, the official one will soon appear in the official webpage.
Here young Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Albert Einstein are looking towards the most urgent questions in relativistic astrophysics, a field that has essentially emerged from their seminal works. The two young guys respectively symbolize the astrophysical and the general-relativistic communities that will gather together at this workshop, to share expertize and try to fill the gap between them.

Last June, Enrico Barausse (at the Institut Astrophysique de Paris), Tamara Bogdanovic (at Georgia Tech in Atlanta), Vitor Cardoso (at CENTRA - Instituto Superior Tecnico in Lisbon) and Elena Maria Rossi (at Leiden University in the Netherlands) and myself have applied to an international call at the Lorentz Center to organize a workshop. We initially had in mind a small-size workshop with ~20 participants, but the proposal was selected for a large-size event. Thus, in less than one month, more than 50 world-leading experts in relativistic astrophysics will gather together in what will hopefully be a fruitful and exciting meeting (here is the program and at list of participants).

Back to Mississippi

First time I went to Oxford Mississippi was 7 years ago, as a visiting master student at The University of Mississippi or, as it is more commonly known, OleMiss. I arrived there around May and, as in most college towns like Oxford, the city emptied right after the term finished, few days after my arrival. This is to say, nothing much was going on in Oxford at that time; nonetheless during my six-month visit there I managed to meet very interesting people, live curious experiences, have fun, and specially work hard in what has later become my field of research. Looking back, I had really a great time.

This is why i'm so excited to come back in Oxford MS tomorrow to attend the Workshop "Testing General Relativity with Astrophysical Observations".

The beautiful logo of the workshop recalls the iconographic Southern magnolia with the trajectory of an extreme mass-ratio inspiral, i.e. the evolution of a stellar-mass compact object orbiting a supermassive black hole like the one at the center of the Milky Way. [credits: Ana Sousa]

This workshop will bring together experts in tests of general relativity, modified theories of gravity and astrophysics. The aim is to foster informal discussions on the current status of experimental constraints on Einstein’s theory and their prospects for the near future, when advanced gravitational-wave observatories will be operational.

The list of participants is impressive and the program promises this will be a fun and fruitful meeting. For me this will also be a special experience, as at Olemiss I met some of my scientific advisors, some closest collaborators and also good friends.

Oxford has been named by USA Today as one of the top six college towns in the U.S. and it is also known as the hometown of  Nobel-prize winning author William Faulkner, as well as residence of novelist and politician John Grisham. However, as a 23-yr old student, I like to remember myself walking around the Olemiss campus while listening to Afroman's hits, which are definitely less literate but undeniably fun. Here is an example, particularly apt for this occasion:

OK, the lyrics is bitter and somehow sexist but, hell, Mississippi is not only Oxford!

I better stop here and continue preparing my slides for this meeting....

Ginjinha physics in Lisbon

Most of the participants of the "Strong Gravity Beyond to GR: from theory to observations" Workshop,
having a typical Ginginha in Lisbon's city center.

The workshop is going great, as you may see. Besides drinking ginjinhas, all talks have been excellent and plenty of interesting discussions are going on. This totally compensates for the 18h/day-effort that we are putting on it!

This picture was taken 10 sec after the previous one. Funny thing: the guy on the bottom left, the lady at the center and the two guys on the right (who were not in the previous one) are just pedestrians who joined the photo for the sake of it, without even paying the workshop fee!

Workshop + School in Lisbon

Next two weeks will be very busy in Lisbon (i'm flying back tomorrow). Next week at IST we have the pleasure to host and organize the first "Strong Gravity Beyond GR: from theory to observations" workshop.

The workshop logo. Here is the webpage

The purpose is to organize a friendly and relaxed meeting for a limited number of scientists who work on gravitational theories aiming at correcting General Relativity and on experimental tests of gravity in general. Next few years will witness a wealth of new astrophysical data: second-generation interferometers promise to detect gravitational waves for the first time, very precise observations of the Milky Way center will allow to infer the properties of the supermassive black hole lurking at it and the exponential grow of cosmological observations will open new windows through which "The Theory" of gravity will reveal itself. This is just the perfect time to organize such a meeting in Europe! I'll try to report on the ongoing events, although each time i promise that I failed miserably...

The logo of the NR/HEP2: Spring School

Moreover, in two weeks from now the IST will host a Spring School on topics at the edge between Numerical Relativity and High Energy physics. The NR/HEP2: Spring School is an event organized within a long-term initiative involving the Universities of Aveiro, Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Rome Sapienza”, Barcelona, Belém do Pará in Brazil, Mississippi and the DAMTP at Cambridge U. Five intense days of lectures are scheduled and, beside one silly guy, i guarantee the speakers are all excellent and it will be fun.

Anyway, these are wonderful excuses for me to take a rest from Boston and enjoy Portuguese weather, food and friends... more soon from Lisboa!

V Black Holes Workshop in Lisbon

Five years ago, Portuguese scientists working in black hole physics started gathering right before Xmas time in a short and informal workshop. The first edition of the Black Hole Workshop was held in Porto and was a sort of reunion of people working worldwide and coming back home for holidays.

Visit the webpage of the V Black Holes Workshop

Over the years, the workshop extended to nonPortuguese people (I started attending it since the second edition) and it developed to what is now a regular international workshop. This year, we in CENTRA have the pleasure to host the fifth edition, which will be held in Lisbon next Monday and Tuesday. We'll have over 60 participants, about 30 talks and a social dinner at the delicious Restaurante dos Passarinhos!

PS:

If you are wondering what the workshop logo is, it's an artistic view (courtesy of Ana Sousa) based on a very typical decoration in Rossio's square, downtown Lisbon.

NRHEP Network First Meeting

The first meeting of the Numerical Relativity and High Energy Physics Network have taken place at Aveiro University, from 9-13 July 2012. This meeting brought together researchers from Brazil, Italy, Portugal, Spain and the USA, to discuss the state of the art in relativistic gravity and its application in various contexts, ranging from astrophysics to particle physics, using both anaytical and numerical techniques.

The organizers produced this nice movie. Visit  the workshop website for more info!