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September 27, 2024 past

PUG Seminar

Whitmore 321 (IGC Lounge)

PUG Seminar

In quantum models of space-time, the metric is often replaced by more fundamental entities, such as spins and Lorentz invariants in spin-foam models, which describe the dynamics of loop quantum gravity. However, in general relativity, the metric field is almost completely determined by the causal structure. This raises the question: how is causality encoded in spin-foam models? In this seminar, I will introduce the basic ingredients of spin-foams and discuss how causality is encoded.

Program

Date Time Speaker Title
2024-09-27 14:00 Chaosong Chen Causality in Spinfoams
About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.