Physics
Scientific paper
Jul 2008
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008jphcs.140a1001d&link_type=abstract
Journal of Physics: Conference Series, Volume 140, Issue 1, pp. 011001 (2008).
Physics
Scientific paper
The sixth International Conference on Gravitation & Cosmology (ICGC-2007) was organized at IUCAA, Pune, 17-21 December 2007. This series of international meetings, held every four years under the auspices of the Indian Association for General Relativity and Gravitation (IAGRG), has now spanned two decades. Previous ICGC meetings were held at Cochin University of Science and Technology (2004), Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (2000), IUCAA, Pune (1995), Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad (1991) & Goa (1987). These meetings have broad international participation and feature leading experts in the field of Cosmology, gravitational waves and quantum gravity.
The frontier of research in Gravitation and Cosmology has seen remarkable progress in the past decades. On the theoretical front, black holes and cosmological singularities continue to challenge and attract quantum gravity researchers. The quest for the detection of Gravitational waves and the promise of gravitational wave astronomy continues to grow and breakthroughs of the past couple of years indicate that numerical relativity is catching up too. The past few years have also seen very ambitious experimental efforts to verify general relativity as the theory of gravitation. Cosmology has been veritably transformed into a precision science with the tremendous improvement in the quantity and quality of cosmological observations. The exquisite measurements not only allow refinement of the cosmological model parameters but have begun to allow observational tests of underlying fundamental assumptions and hunt for subtle deviations that could be the key to understanding the early universe. The sixth meeting brought together active scientists from all over the globe to present the state of the art at the frontiers of research. It also offered younger Indian researchers an opportunity for interaction with experts from within India and abroad. The meeting was attended by over 160 participants.
The scientific programme had 21 plenary talks on current theoretical, observational and experimental topics in Cosmology, General Relativity, detection of gravitational waves, and various approaches to Quantum gravity. The meeting also included three intensive parallel workshops focused on Cosmology, Classical General Relativity & Gravitational waves and Quantum Gravity, respectively. The workshops had around 75 oral presentations. The immensely rich and diverse scientific programme was highlighted in the concluding remarks by the late Professor Juergen Ehlers. A public lecture on `Oldest light in the Universe' by NASA scientist, Professor Gary Hinshaw, who is a member of the WMAP team (formerly, also a member of the COBE-DMR team that won the Nobel prize in 2006) was also organized as part of ICGC-07 and drew sizable audience from the public in Pune.
The proceedings contains articles by the plenary speakers, the concluding remarks and a summary of each of the three workshops. We also include an obituary for Professor Juergen Ehlers, who passed away on 20 May 2008. The sentiments expressed in the obituary are shared by the editors and members of IAGRG. Professor Ehlers had participated very actively during the meeting and delivered an excellent concluding talk on the conference. We are indeed fortunate to able to include in this volume, what is perhaps, his last article. A possible reflection of the tight schedule of researchers in the booming period of research in Cosmology and Gravitation is the number of missing articles by plenary speakers. Due to various reasons, we were able to get only 11 of the 21 plenary talks for publication in this volume. In order to ensure that the volume is published within a year of the conference, we decided to publish the proceedings with the available articles.
The meeting was financially supported by generous contribution from Indian organizations: ISRO, CSIR, DST, BNRS and IAGRG; and from Indian institutes: HRI (Allahabad), IIA (Bangalore), IMSc (Chennai), RRI (Bangalore), SINP (Kolkata) and IUCAA. The conference banquet was sponsored by Hewlett-Packard and the reception dinner was sponsored by the Bank of Baroda. We thank them all. It is a pleasure to thank Professor Naresh Dadhich, Director, IUCAA, members of the IAGRG council, members of the SOC and members of the LOC for their pivotal role in the organization of the conference, and the speakers, the participants, and the IUCAA staff for their efforts which made the sixth ICGC a very successful meeting.
Ghanashyam Date Institute for Mathematical Science, Chennai Tarun Souradeep Inter-University Centre for Astronomy & Astrophysics, Pune
Scientific Organizing Committee Ghanashyam Date (Chairman, SOC, IMSc, India) Abhay Ashtekar (Pennsylvania State Univ., US) Bhuvnesh Jain (Univ. of Pennsylvania, US) Carlo Rovelli (CPT, Marseille, France) Clifford M. Will (Washington Univ., US) Gabriela Gonza'lez (Lousiana State Univ., US) Hideo Kodama (Kyoto Univ. Japan) John Ellis (CERN, Switzerland) Luc Blanchet (IAP, France) Madhavan Varadarajan (RRI, India) Masaru Shibata (Univ. of Tokyo, Japan) Narayan Banerjee (Jadavpur Univ. India) Parthasarathi Mitra (SINP, India) Rajesh Gopakumar (HRI, India) Sanjeev Dhurandhar (IUCAA, India) Somnath Bharadwaj (IITKGP, India) Subhendra Mohanty (PRL, India) Subir Sarkar (Univ. of Oxford, UK) Tarun Souradeep (IUCAA, India) T. P. Singh (TIFR, India)
Local Organizing Committee Tarun Souradeep (Chairman, LOC) Biswajit Pandey Gaurang Mahajan Manjiri Mahabal Maulik Parikh Minu Joy Moumita Aich Niranjan Abhyankar Nirupama Bawdekar Ratna Rao Saugata Chatterjee Savita Dalvi Sharanya Sur Snehlata Shankar Subharthi Ray Sudhanshu Barway Tuhin Ghosh
Plenary Speakers and Talks The Plenary Talks are available at http://meghnad.iucaa.ernet.in/~icgc07/ Gary Hinshaw Status of WMAP Data Andrew Jaffe The Future of CMB Studies Subir Sarkar Cosmology beyond the Standard Model HongSheng Zhao Dark Matter and Dark Energy: Puzzles and an Alternative Solution Subhabrata Majumdar Cosmology with Clusters David Langlois Cosmological Perturbations from Inflation John Conklin The Gravity Probe B Experiment and Results B. Sathyaprakash Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology with Gravitational Waves Rana Adhikari Survey of Gravitational Waves Experiments John Baker Survey of Numerical Relativity Results Maria Alessandra Papa Data Analysis for Gravitational Wave Detectors Alessandra Buonanno Interfacing analytical and numerical relativity in modeling binary black hole coalescences Andy Fabian X-ray detection of spinning black hole Alejandro Corichi Black Holes in Loop Quantum Gravity Madhavan Varadarajan Black Hole Information Loss Puzzle in LQG Parampreet Singh Big Bang Singularity Resolution in Loop Quantum Cosmology Sumit Das Cosmological Singularities in String Theory and Gauge-Gravity Duality Samir Mathur What do black holes tell us about the state of the early Universe? Martin Reuter Asymptotic Safety in Quantum Gravity Keiichi Maeda Beyond the Einstein-Hilbert Action Jurgen Ehlers Concluding Remarks
Date Ghanashyam
Souradeep Tarun
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