Author Archives: Holly Young

Amaldi12 – The Edoardo Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves

Posted on by

It’s been a busy few weeks for CQG – we’ve been to the Era of Gravitational Wave Astronomy conference in Paris, hosted the annual Editorial Board meeting in London, attended the Loops17 conference in Warsaw and now it’s time to fly off to California for Amaldi12.

Amaldi12

Amaldi12, named after Edoardo Amaldi, will be held at the Hilton Hotel in Pasadena, CA from 9th – 14th July. The conference will explore the science around gravitational waves and their detection, particularly in light of the confirmed detections by LIGO-Virgo and new advances with the LISA mission.

I will be at the conference Monday through Friday with a table top booth at the event, located near the international ballroom in the hotel. I’m really interested in hearing your thoughts about the journal, so please do stop by say hello and have a chat.

Congratulations to Dr Bernard Kelly, CQG Reviewer of the Year

Posted on by

Classical and Quantum Gravity is proud to recognise excellence in peer review and acknowledge our reviewers for their invaluable contribution to the journal.

Bernard Kelly

Bernard Kelly, University of Maryland, Baltimore County & NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Congratulations to Dr Bernard Kelly who has won our newly introduced ‘Reviewer of the Year‘ title for his excellent referee reports throughout 2016.  Below Dr Kelly gives us some insight into his process of reviewing and tells us a little bit more about himself.

Tell us how you go about reviewing an article?

First I sit on it for a week or so, thinking “Sounds appropriate. I’ll take a look when I get the chance”. And then the next thing, the journal is pinging me with a follow-up notification, which is when I realise I’ve let too much time slip by.

I read the title, abstract, gloss over the Introduction, and try to assess how mathematically involved the text is, and how much overlap there is with my own areas of expertise (or at least competence). I don’t expect to be familiar with all aspects of the research, but if it’s 50% or better (in whatever fuzzy metric I’m using), I think it’s worth giving it a serious look. Occasionally, I find that what I thought was going to be a good fit wasn’t on closer inspection, and I end up declining.

Now I print the paper out: in colour, if I’m feeling extravagant with my lab’s resources, but usually in B & W. It’s impractical to mark up PDFs on a laptop; perhaps it’d be better on a full-size tablet, but I don’t have one yet. I break out two pens — usually blue & red.

Continue reading →

The Era of Gravitational-Wave Astronomy

Posted on by

At the beginning of next week I will be attending the Era of Gravitational Wave Astronomy conference (or TEGRAW 2017, for short) at the Institut D’Astrophysique in Paris, France.

tegraw

The conference aims to highlight the most recent developments in both theoretical works (such as the two-body problem, effective theories, numerical relativity, and tests of gravity theories) and experimental works (such as future detectors, both on ground and in space).

IOP Publishing/ CQG will have a small table top booth at the event so feel free to stop by if you fancy having a chat. I’ll only be there Monday through Wednesday (unfortunately missing the social event) but am looking forward to meeting you.

I hope to see you in Paris!

A brief history of Supergravity: the first 3 weeks

Posted on by
StanleyDeser2009_01

Stanley Deser is emeritus Ancell Professor of Physics at Brandeis University and a Senior Research Associate at Caltech

Background
Prior to Supergravity’s (SUGRA’s) inception, the ideas in the air came from two new, quite different realms.  One realm was supersymmetry (SUSY); the other arose from the emerging difficulties in achieving consistent interactions between gravity and higher (s > 1) spin gauge fields.

Indeed, the Western discoverers of SUSY, Julius Wess and Bruno Zumino [1], would frequently visit Boston from NYU to spread the SUSY gospel, which did get even our blasé attention after a while, especially since the simplest SUSY multiplet pattern (s; s + 1/2) linking adjoining Fermi-Bose fields had no obvious reason to stop at the s = 0 and s = 1/2 models that had been studied thus far.
Continue reading →

Interview with Daniela Saadeh: winner of the IOP Gravitational Physics Group (GPG) thesis prize

Posted on by
Daniela Saadeh

Daniela Saadeh – UCL Astrophysics Group

CQG is proud to sponsor the IOP Gravitational Physics Group (GPG) thesis prize. This year the prize was awarded to Daniela Saadeh, who we have interviewed below. Congratulations Daniela!

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

A fundamental assumption of the standard model of cosmology is that the large-scale Universe is isotropic – i.e. that its properties are independent of direction. Historically, this concept stemmed from the Copernican Principle, the philosophical statement that we do not occupy a ‘special’ place in the Universe. In physical terms, this idea is converted into the assumption that all positions and directions in the Universe are equivalent, so that no observer is ‘privileged’.

However, assumptions must be tested, especially foundational ones. General relativity – our standard theory of gravity – allows for many ways in which spacetime could be anisotropic: directional symmetry is not fundamentally required. If the Universe were indeed to be anisotropic, we would actually need to carefully revise our understanding (for instance, calculations about its history or content). Making this health check is very important! Continue reading →