Physics
Scientific paper
Jun 2007
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007jphcs..66a1001a&link_type=abstract
Journal of Physics: Conference Series, Volume 66, Issue 1, pp. 011001 (2007).
Physics
Scientific paper
These are exciting times for any scientist working on relativity, cosmology and/or gravitation. The contents of this volume correspond to the 2006 Spanish Relativity Meeting, held at Palma de Mallorca. Since the 2005 meeting, which took place in Oviedo, many important developments have taken place in this area of knowledge.
Take for instance the numerical relativity community, my own subject. During the past year, we achieved long-term numerical simulations of binary-black-hole systems. For the first time, we managed to extract the gravitational wave profiles for different configurations of these important astrophysical systems.
This was a real milestone because binary-black-holes are the most likely candidates for sources of gravitational waves that could be detected by ground-based interferometric facilities like LIGO or VIRGO. This is not just an elaborate claim. We have actually started to generate a library of BBH gravitational wave patterns that can be used as templates for matched filtering of the experimental data.
Concerning the big experimental projects themselves, the Franco-Italian collaboration VIRGO had just finished the engineering runs and was then ready to start taking scientific data in the autumn, just after the closure of the Meeting. The American project LIGO, in turn, during that year performed its 5th science run, achieving its design sensitivity. So the hunt for gravitational wave signals has really started in earnest.
Another great achievement is that after two decades of anticipation, we are finally in the position of analyzing real data to the expected accuracy. The quality of the data is greatly improved by running in coincidence both the Pacific and the Atlantic LIGO sites plus the German facility GEO600. You may wonder how the data analysis task force has not drowned in the huge amount of data!
In mentioning vasty quantities of experimental data, let me point out here the recent release of the results from the analysis of the full three-year dataset of the Microwave Anisotropy Probe. When these results are cross-referenced with other observations, such as supernova expansion surveys, we get fits for the cosmological parameters giving values with error bars that we can trust up to the third digit. This means that we have entered an era of precision cosmology. So things are getting really serious.
Another exciting initiative started in summer 2005 with the debate about the role of general relativity in explaining the rotation speed profiles in galaxies. This was an old astrophysical problem, which was currently dealt with Newtonian gravity and an ad hoc amount of dark matter. Now it seems clear that general relativity has something to contribute, by lowering at least the amount of dark matter required to explain the observed rotation curves.
So we have moved on substantially from the old times, the `dark years', when relativity was regarded even by well respected physicists as a sort of mathematical curiosity, a field with little experimental contrast, and therefore open to wild speculation. But maybe those `dark years' were not such a bad thing after all: there is a lot of fun in using advanced mathematics and unconstrained imagination. We can still find this fun nowadays in the search for explanation for dark matter and dark energy, and, of course, in the wonderful brane worlds.
So these are exciting times for relativity, in many different ways. I hope that you will enjoy all of them in the proceedings. On behalf of the organizing committee, I would like to thank all the participants: without them this XXIXth edition of the ERE could not have taken place; special thanks to all those who contributed talks to the meeting, thus making possible the present proceedings.
Let me finish by thanking the Sa Nostra foundation for offering its superb Conference Center and all the other sponsors, especially the Spanish Ministry of Education, and also the Balearic Islands Government, the SEGRE, ILIAS N6 and, last but not least, our home University; thanks to all of them for their strong support.
Carles Bona President of the Local Organizing Committee (Palma de Mallorca, March 2007)
Apostolopoulos Pantelis
Bona Carles
Carot Jaume
Mas L.
Sintes Alicia M.
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