January 1, 2020

IGC’s Rachael Huxford was co-author of one of the most-read publications in The Physics Teacher of the American Association of Physics Teachers.

The paper describes a demonstration on classroom simulation of gravitational waves from orbiting binaries. Popular demonstrations commonly use stretched spandex fabric to illustrate the way in which curved spacetime mimics the force of gravity in general relativity. In this spirt, Huxford and co-authors used a similar mode to illustrate gravitational waves from orbiting binaries, whose discovery was recognized with the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics. They developed a simple and inexpensive demonstration which produces the pattern of outgoing spiral ripples that has entered the public imagination through images from numerical simulations.

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.