Previous Bulletins

Saeed Mirshekari and Nicolás Bernal joined ICTP-SAIFR in September as FAPESP postdoctoral fellows. An expert on gravitational waves and member of the LIGO collaboration, Saeed recently obtained his PhD working with Clifford Will at Washington University in St. Louis on Inspiraling Compact Binaries. Nicolás joined ICTP-SAIFR after a postdoctoral period at the Bethe Center for Theoretical Physics and the Institute of Physics in Bonn where he worked on astroparticle physics, specializing in baryogenesis from WIMPs and dark matter properties from gamma ray lines.

The ICTP-SAIFR has an opening for a new permanent research professor. Although the search will concentrate in the area of cosmology and related fields, candidates from all areas of theoretical physics are encouraged to apply before December 14. 2013. The search committee is chaired by Peter Goddard, and the search committee members are Marcela Carena, David Gross, Leo Kadanoff, Martin Rees, Uros Seljak, Robert Wald, Simon White, Edward Witten and Matias Zaldarriaga.

Following a request from ICTP-SAIFR, UNESP approved an unlimited campus-wide license for Wolfram Mathematica software which is widely used in all areas of computational science.  With financial resources from the Dean of Research Office, headed by Maria José Gianini, the contract with Wolfram was signed in September.

ICTP-SAIFR acting director Nathan Berkovits was elected fellow of The World Academy of Science (TWAS) for his work on covariant quantization of the superstring. TWAS is a global academy for science in the developing world and the election took place on October 1 at the Academy's 24th General Meeting in Buenos Aires .

During the month of August, ICTP-SAIFR researcher Riccardo Sturani presented a minicourse of eight lectures on the application of effective field theory methods to the two-body problem of general relativity and the resulting predictions for gravitational wave emission. And on Sept. 26, the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) scientific collaboration accepted the IFT/ICTP-SAIFR group led by Sturani, whose main research activity will be LIGO data analysis in the search of gravitational wave signals from coalescing binaries.

Prof. Rabinovici is the former Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and one of the founders of the SESAME light source, a scientific collaboration among countries in the middle east. He gave a Colloquium on the history and development of the SESAME project, as well as a technical seminar on AdS-CFT.

This school discussed several approaches to resolving the issues of quantum gravity which involve different communities of physicists. String theory, AdS-CFT, Loop Quantum Gravity, Asymptotic Safety and Entropic Gravity were some of the topics of the lectures attended by over 100 students and taught by leaders of the different fields, such as John Schwarz, Juan Maldacena, Martin Reuter, Alejandro Perez, Erik Verlinde and Abhay Ashtekar.

Celso Grebogi, director of the Institute for Complex Systems and Mathematical Biology, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, presented three lectures on topics related to Complex Systems, including Population Dynamics, System Biology and Quantum Chaos. The set of lectures was followed by a discussion among invited specialists on Complex Systems concerning ways to improve research in this field and how ICTP-SAIFR could play a role

School on Fundamental Astrophysics (October 7 – 18)

Rosly Minicourse on Twistor Theory (October 8 – November 15)

Program on Amplitudes and Correlation Functions (October 20 – December 20)

Redi Minicourse on Composite Higgs (October 23 – 25)

Workshop on Higher-Spin and Higher Curvature Gravity (November 4 – 7)

School on Nonlinear Optics and Nanophotonics (November 25 – December 6)

III Southern-Summer School on Mathematical Biology (February 3 – 15)
Application Deadline, December 7

If you do not want to receive this newsletter in the future click here.