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December 6, 2024 past

PUG Seminar

Whitmore 321 (IGC Lounge)

PUG Seminar

The precise measurement of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) has opened a window to connect fundamental physics with observations. If spacetime exhibited a strong quantum mechanical behavior before the Hot Big Bang, could we detect signatures of this regime today? In this introductory seminar, we explore how the study of correlations in the CMB sky can address this question, highlighting recent developments and possible future avenues for an effective, evidence-based approach to quantum gravity.

Program

Date Time Speaker Title
2024-12-06 14:00 Mauricio Gamonal Searching for Quantum Gravity in the Sky
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.