Gravity as an Effective Medium (17rit680)
Organizers
Cliff Burgess (McMaster University and Perimeter Institute)
Peter Adshead (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Richard Holman (Minerva Schools at KGI)
Vincent Vennin (University of Portsmouth)
Description
The Banff International Research Station will host the "Gravity as an Effective Medium" workshop in Banff from STARTDATE to ENDDATE.
It is something of a paradox that cosmology - the science of the Universe as a whole - provides many puzzles that inform fundamental physics - usually thought to be the science of the Universe's smallest constituents and their mutual interactions. It does so because the expansion of the Universe allows microscopic effects (like quantum fluctuations in the vacuum) to be stretched across the sky where they can be observed as patterns within the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (itself a visible echo of the primordial Big Bang that launched the present-day cosmic expansion).
This interplay between the science of the very large and the very small allows surprising connections to be made between developments in what superficially seem to be completely unrelated disciplines. The research of this program aims to extend and develop one such a surprising connection: the use of tools developed to describe the evolution of light (and other particles) through matter to predict very long-lived processes involving gravity. Besides the late-time behaviour of the Universe as a whole, such very long-time processes also include the description of how information comes out of Black Holes as they evaporate due to their emission of Hawking radiation.
The Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery (BIRS) is a collaborative Canada-US-Mexico venture that provides an environment for creative interaction as well as the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and methods within the Mathematical Sciences, with related disciplines and with industry. The research station is located at The Banff Centre in Alberta and is supported by Canada's Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), Alberta's Advanced Education and Technology, and Mexico's Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT).
