Daily Archives: April 2, 2014

Interview with Dr Anna Heffernan: winner of the 2014 IOP Gravitational Physics Group’s thesis prize, co-sponsored by CQG

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Anna Heffernan

Dr Anna Heffernan, Advanced Concepts Team, European Space Agency

What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

I’ve always enjoyed Mathematics and learning about the world around me. General relativity allows us to use mathematics to probe the very space time in which we exist – I find this fascinating, and it means I also get to play with equations for a living.

What do you find most interesting about this subject?

The fundamental questions it both addresses and raises. I also like the idea that with the emergence of gravitational wave astronomy, general relativity will soon be used as a tool to explore our universe.

Can you tell us a little bit about the work in your thesis?

Sure, my thesis was on the self-force problem – this is when Continue reading →

IOP GPG thesis prize awarded to Dr Anna Heffernan

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Clifford Will

Clifford Will is the Editor-in-Chief of Classical and Quantum Gravity, Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Florida, Chercheur Associé at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, and James McDonnell Professor of Space Sciences Emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis.

I am delighted to announce that the IOP’s Gravitational Physics Group’s thesis prize for 2014, co-sponsored by Classical and Quantum Gravity, has been awarded to Dr Anna Heffernan for her eloquently written thesis on the self-force problem in gravitational physics, and for her detailed calculation of the singular component of the divergent fields that arise.

Dr Heffernan obtained her PhD from University College Dublin, under the supervision of Prof. Adrian Ottewill.  She currently works at Continue reading →

Continuous symmetries in discrete space?

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Martin Bojowald

Martin Bojowald is a Professor of Physics at Pennsylvania State University, PA,
USA

Violating Lorentz symmetries can be dangerous. A new model assesses this threat in loop quantum gravity.

Discrete space is attractive in quantization attempts of gravity, but it implies the great danger of violating Lorentz transformations. Any approach must show that modifications of symmetries by discrete space are tame enough for predictions to be consistent with continuum low-energy physics. In the CQG paper, Sandipan Sengupta constructs an encouraging model using Continue reading →

Asymptotic flatness and quantum geometry

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Sandipan Sengupta

Sandipan Sengupta is a post-doctoral fellow at the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore, India

From the perspective of quantum gravity, the spacetime is smooth only in an effective sense, and is expected to exhibit a discrete structure at suitably small length scales. Within the gauge theoretic formulation of gravity, there are certain kinematical states which provide an elegant realization of such a scenario. These are known as the spin-network states, and are used extensively in certain quantization approaches, e.g. Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG). However, since these states correspond to a spatially discrete quantum geometry, they cannnot be used to capture the notion of a classical spacetime continuum. This leads to a serious obstacle towards a quantization of Continue reading →

Homogeneous cosmological model from a discrete matter distribution

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Mikolaj Korzynski

Mikolaj Korzynski is an Assistant Professor at the Center of Theoretical Physics
of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw

How does a homogeneous FLRW metric arise from a cosmological model with black holes as the only source of gravitational field?

In astrophysical applications of general relativity we often need to apply the Einstein’s field equations to situations where the matter distribution, and consequently also the metric tensor, has a complicated form with relatively smooth large scale behavior and a  complicated structure on smaller scales. The problems of this kind are usually approached in the following way: instead of solving the equations directly we apply them to an idealized metric with the small-scale structure removed by Continue reading →