Welcome to the website of the 7th edition of the Winter Workshop on Theoretical Physics. This event will take place at the Lise Meitner auditorium of the Faculty of Physics of the University of Valencia (Spain) on December 11-13, 2023. 

Direct links to the talks: 

Meeting ID: 933 4313 5081
Access Code: 19051915

Direct links to the talks: 

Though still struggling with the COVID-19 nightmare, we are back and ready to face a new edition of the Valencia Winter Workshop on Theoretical Physics. This time this event will take place at the Seminar Room of the Department of Theoretical Physics of the University of Valencia and, at the same time, it will be broadcasted live from our BigBlueButton meeting room and also via our YouTube channel. On site and online participation is thus very welcome. 

Like in previous editions, this meeting is intended to bring together researchers with common interests on the geometric structure of space-time, quantum properties of gravity, cosmology, and astrophysics who collaborate with the host group via active projects (FunFiCO-777740, i-COOP20462, PROMETEO 2020/079, FIS2017-84440-C2- 1-P,  PID2020-116567GB-C21, …) or have close ties with them. 

Fundamental questions about the foundations of gravitation, the role of quantized fields in curved space-times, cosmological and astrophysical signatures of gravity within and beyond General Relativity, and recent developments on other topics, will be reviewed in a series of invited/contributed talks, and open discussions. 

The idea of the workshop is to encourage everyone, from seniors to less-experienced students and postdocs, to present some results obtained during the year 2021 that they find particularly relevant/interesting/easy to discuss in a relaxed atmosphere, possibly using the pdf of a paper already on arXiv or some scanned handwritten notes of a current work in progress, and addressing a few simple questions: 

1. What is it about?
2. Why is it important? (An explanation of what is unique and/or timely about this topic and the difference it might make with respect to previous work). 
3. Perspectives. 

The contributions are NOT expected to last 60 minutes. Rather 15-25 minute conceptual presentations with minimal calculations (if possible) are encouraged for everyone. The subsequent discussion and questions could extend as much as needed, depending on the audience participation. To be more concrete, for students we expect talks of about 20' (+10' of discussion), and for postdocs/seniors up to 30'(+15' of discussion) at most. All non-essential calculations could be provided to those interested for their individual analysis. The idea is to have talks not too focused on technicalities (if the topic allows, obviously) but have more discussions which could lead to new works/collaborations in 2022 and beyond. 

The workshop programme appears below: Click on each item for more information.  

If you are an online speaker or simply want to participate in the discussions, please join us via BigBlueButton (no need to install anything, just click).

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:

• Flavio Bombacigno.
• Florencia A. Teppa Pannia.
• Gonzalo J. Olmo.  
• Andreu S. Masó. 
• Antonio Ferreiro de Aguiar.
• Sergi Nadal. 
• Adrià Delhom I Latorre. 
• Pau Beltrán Palau.

This meeting is organized by the Quantum Black Holes, Supergravity and Cosmology group at the Department of Theoretical Physics & IFIC of the University of Valencia & CSIC, Spain.

Photo of this post by  Pepe Serrador, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons.

In the year 2020 the UV-QG group started a collaboration with members of the University of Cape Town (UCT) at the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, and the UCT Astrophysics, Cosmology and Gravity Centre (ACGC). This collaboration was possible thanks to the economic support of the internationalization program i-COOP of CSIC through the grant COOPB20462. 

As part of the activities of this project, in December 2020 members of UCT participated in our 4th Valencia Winter Workshop, and in May 2021 we organized for them the 1^st i-School and Conference on Metric-Affine Gravity, both of which were held completely online due to mobility restrictions caused by the COVID-19 epidemics. 

Now that vaccines are allowing some relaxation on international mobility, two members of the UCT team, namely, Dr. Álvaro de la Cruz Dombriz and Dr. Jahed Abedi, will visit us in Valencia during the week of November 15-19, 2021. For this occasion, we are organizing a Workshop on Black Holes, Cosmology, and Metric-Affine Gravity, which will take place in a hybrid format on November 18-19. Some talks will be delivered at the Seminar Room of the Department of Theoretical Physics of the University of Valencia in Burjassot and others will be delivered remotely. As usual, everything will be broadcasted live from our Big Blue Button meeting room and also via our YouTube channel. 

Besides our colleagues from UCT, this week we will also have Dr. Fabio Moretti (Sapienza, Università di Roma), who will also join us for this event. Dr. Moretti collaborates with Simon Boudet (visiting us from September to December, 2021), Flavio Bombacigno, and Gonzalo J. Olmo on topics related with metric-affine gravity and gravitational waves. 

If you want to know more about our special guests of this event, here you have a short bio of them: 

Dr. Álvaro de la Cruz Dombriz:  

Since August 2015, Álvaro (Aranjuez, 1980) has been a Faculty Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and a member of the UCT Astrophysics, Cosmology and Gravity Centre (ACGC) at UCT. Previously, awarded a PhD at the Complutense University of Madrid (2010, Summa cum Laude) on theoretical and observational constraints in extended theories of gravity. Subsequently held a postdoctoral fellow post at the UCT Cosmology and Gravity group and obtained a Marie Curie postdoctoral contract at the ICE-IEEC Barcelona. 

Álvaro’s publications include more than 50 peer-reviewed articles with seminal contributions in the areas of cosmological large-scale structures, foundations of theories beyond Einsteinian gravity, particularly on Scalar-Tensor gravity theories, and indirect methods of dark matter detections.

To date, Álvaro has been member of the scientific teams for seventeen research funded projects. Since 2016 he has been a member of two running EU-COST actions and along the course of his career he has been the Principal Investigator (PI) for six funded research projects in both Europe and South Africa.

In 2017 he was appointed as an Associate in the SKA Cosmology and Gravitational Waves collaboration and was honoured with the Young Researcher Award, (UCT College of Fellows, 2017) and the Claude Leon Foundation Merit Award for Early-career Researchers (2018).

Dr. Jahed Abedi: 

Jahed Abedi, a postdoctoral researcher from UCT and University of Stavanger, is a black hole physicist, working on gravitational physics in both observational side such as searching for GW echoes and QNMs in LIGO/Virgo data and theoretical side such as BH perturbations, QNMs, and QFT in curved space-time.
 

Dr. Fabio Moretti: 

Fabio Moretti obtained his PhD in 2021 at the University of Rome "La Sapienza", with a thesis on gravitational waves in modified theory of gravity. His principal interests cover propagation and interaction of gravitational waves with astrophysical media in extensions of general relativity, with special emphasis on additional polarizations and settling of dispersive/dissipative phenomena. He is also involved in compact objects physics, where he mainly deals with the role of additional scalar degrees of freedom in stellar structure and evolution.

The workshop programme appears below. Click on each item for more information.  

If you are an online speaker or simply want to participate in the discussions, please join us via BigBlueButton (no need to install anything, just click).

Direct links to the talks: 

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:

• Flavio Bombacigno. 
• Florencia A. Teppa Pannia.
• Andreu Masó.
• Gonzalo J. Olmo.
• Silvia Pla García. 

Photo of this post by Andreas Selter on Unsplash

Esta semana el programa Pegando la Hebra de Plaza Radio ha entrevistado a nuestra compañera María A. Lledó (Marian). En esta entrevista habla de sus dos pasiones: la física teórica y la poesía.

No os perdáis su descripción de la teoría de cuerdas, de los problemas entre teoría cuántica y relatividad general, y otras cuestiones relacionadas con agujeros negros y el espacio-tiempo.  

Para escucharlo, haz click sobre esta imagen:

Photo de cabecera by Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash 

Particle trajectories in metric affine spacetimes: observing torsion with a WKB approach.

We are pleased to initiate our seminar session this year with a talk by our colleague Simon Boudet, who will be visiting our Department until the end of December 2021. 

Simon got his master degree at the university of Rome" La Sapienza" in 2019, with a thesis entitled "Implementation of Ashtekar variables in the Palatini f(R) theory of gravity", where he dealt with a generalization of the Loop Quantum Gravity formalism to scalar tensor theories. Currently, his research activity mainly focuses on classical and semiclassical aspects of metric affine models of gravity, with special emphasis on compact objects physic and cosmological implementations.

The title and abstract of his talk are the following: 

TITLE: Particle trajectories in metric affine spacetimes: observing torsion with a WKB approach.

ABSTRACT: In this talk I will review some aspects of trajectories followed by test particles in metric affine theories of gravity. Firstly, I will introduce the notions of geodesic motion and autoparallel paths, showing as within an eikonal  approximation photon do not carry information about torsion and nonmetricity. Then, I will discuss the case of fermions, and I will derive, according a WKB method, the modification induced by torsion to geodesic trajectories. Finally, I will briefly sketch some hypothetically observable phenomena related to neutrinos.

Coordinates: Tuesday October 19th at 10:30 in the seminar room of the Theoretical Physics Department.

Follow this session online via BigBlueButton.

Also on our YouTube channel. 

Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash

We are very happy to announce that in March 2021, our colleague Adrià Delhom i Latorre received a notificacion from the Institute of Physics (IoP) to let him know he had been named "Trusted Reviewer". According to the IoP website, "Achieving ‘IOP trusted reviewer’ status demonstrates an exceptionally high level of peer review competency".  Below he tells us in his own words about his experience in the refereeing process. Our most sincere Congratulations, Adri! 

During the first two years of my PhD I have been gaining experience in publishing research papers, both with collaborators and alone. At some point, I received my first request for being the reviewer of a pre-print that was submitted for Physics Letters B, a journal where I had published a couple of papers before. Although I am not sure how this happened, I guess that it was through an (anonymous) colleague, who noticed my works and thought that I could be a good reviewer for that related work, hence recommending my nomination to the editor whenever she/he has to decline the offer to review it for her/his reasons (maybe lack of time?). In any case, I accepted to review the manuscript, which I ended up accepting as the authors carefully took into account my criticisms. Some time later, I received another request for reviewing an article, but this time for the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, which belongs to IOP Science and where I have also published an article. The type of papers that are submitted to this journal are typically long and technical but, after a quick overall read, I though that I could do a good job as a reviewer, given that it was within my range of expertise.