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Mauricio Gamonal

Mauricio Gamonal — Graduate Student
Office: 322 Whitmore Laboratory
Address: 104 Davey Lab, Box C-35
mfg5767@psu.edu
Mauricio Gamonal
Physics Loop Quantum Gravity Mathematical Structures Quantum Universe CFT

I'm a Fulbright Fellow and currently a PhD candidate in Physics at Penn State, under the supervision of Prof. Eugenio Bianchi. As a member of the CFT, I'm working to contribute to our understanding of the fundamental structure of spacetime. I'm particularly interested in building a bridge between certain formal approaches to quantum gravity and its phenomenology, e.g., by studying the imprints in the CMB due to a pre-inflationary epoch, or signatures in the spectrum of primordial gravitational waves. Other research interests include fundamental aspects of causality and the emergence of classicality in our Universe, formal aspects of the spinfoam formulation of loop quantum gravity, the propagation and detection of gravitational radiation in cosmological spacetimes, and the role of symmetry breaking in the context of quantum cosmology. As a member of the IGC, I'm also contributing with the organization of the Primordial Universe and Gravitation (PUG) seminar.

Other personal interests include music, photography, science communication (I have some individual projects, in particular for Spanish speakers) and outreach activities (Fisica Itinerante in Chile, and at Penn State I've participated in PAW+ and in the podcast Gravi-tea time!). I have been inducted into the honor society for first-generation students, Tri-Alpha.

Visit my website

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0677-4926

Publications
  1. Eugenio Bianchi, Mauricio Gamonal “Squeezed vacua and primordial features in effective theories of inflation at N2LO.” (2024)
  2. Eugenio Bianchi, Mauricio Gamonal “Primordial power spectrum at N3LO in effective theories of inflation.” Phys. Rev. D 110 (2024) doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.110.104032
  3. Mauricio Gamonal “Slow-roll inflation in f(R,T) gravity and a modified Starobinsky-like inflationary model.” Phys. Dark Univ. 31 (2021) doi:10.1016/j.dark.2020.100768
  4. Jorge Alfaro, Mauricio Gamonal “A nontrivial footprint of standard cosmology in the future observations of low-frequency gravitational waves.” Gen. Rel. Grav. 52 12 (2020) doi:10.1007/s10714-020-02771-2
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.