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Testing Gravity 2019
23-26 January 2019, SFU Harbour Center, Vancouver, BC, Canada
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Testing Gravity 2019 is the 3rd Testing Gravity conference hosted by SFU bringing together leading experts on various ways of testing laws of gravity. Testing Gravity remains a topical theme because of the unexplained nature of Dark Matter and Dark Energy and the long-standing failure to reconcile gravity with quantum physics. Like the 2015 and the 2017 meetings, Testing Gravity 2019 will feature the latest updates from the gravitational wave detectors, cosmological surveys and other experiments, as well as discussions of recent theoretical advances. The conference aims to provide theorists working on extensions of General Relativity with a realistic perspective on what aspects of their theories can be tested. On the other hand, the experimentalists and observers will get a chance to learn about new ideas that their experiments can test.Wednesday, January 23rd, will feature a "school" with five review lectures given by some of the invited speakers providing background into the key topics covered by the conference. The main conference, January 24-26, will include invited and contributed talks, and a poster session.
Topics on Agenda:gravitational wavesastrophysical tests, pulsars, black holesterrestrial tests, gravity on short distancescosmological probes: CMB, 21 cm, redshift surveys, weak lensingparticle cosmology, dark mattermodified gravity theoriesquantum gravity and emergent gravityReview Lectures:introduction to general relativity (Dimitrios Psaltis)the landscape of modified gravity (Lam Hui)binary systems and gravitational waves (Nicolas Yunes)neutron stars, astrophysical tests of GR (Jeremy Heyl)cosmological tests of GR (Alessandra Silvestri)
Conference Program:
Conference Organizers:Andrei Frolov (SFU)Makoto Fujiwara (TRIUMF)José Tomas Gálvez Ghersi (SFU)Levon Pogosian (SFU)Maxim Pospelov (Victoria/Perimeter)Dimitrios Psaltis (Arizona)Douglas Scott (UBC)Alessandra Silvestri (Leiden)subscribe to conference newscontact organizing committee
Invited Speakers:Hartmut Abele (TU Wien)Eric Adelberger (U. Wash)Avery Broderick (Waterloo)Alessandra Buonanno (AEI)Cliff Burgess (McMaster)Manuela Campanelli (Rochester)Ruth Gregory (Durham)Jeremy Heyl (UBC)Lam Hui (Columbia)Bhuvnesh Jain (UPenn)Mark Kasevich (Stanford)Justin Khoury (UPenn)Will Percival (Waterloo)Dimitrios Psaltis (Arizona)Misao Sasaki (IPMU)Alessandra Silvestri (Leiden)Ingrid Stairs (UBC)Chukman So (TRIUMF)Mark Trodden (Penn)Tanmay Vachaspati (ASU)Mark Wise (Caltech)Nico Yunes (Montana)Registered Participants:current registered participant list
The registration fee is 300 CAD for regular and 150 CAD for student participants if paid prior to November 30th, 2018. After that, the fees increase at 350 and 200 CAD respectively. Banquet tickets are 75 CAD per person.The additional fee for attendance of the pre-conference school is 50 CAD. The school will feature five lectures by some of the invited conference speakers. Lectures will cover an introduction to General Relativity (GR), binary systems and gravitational waves, neutron stars and astrophysical tests of GR, review of alternative gravity theories, and cosmological tests of GR.
Registration closes January 22th, 2019. Cancellations are subject to 10% penalty, with no refunds after January 11th, 2019. Payment of registration fees is processed online by SFU Meeting, Event and Conference Services. All credit card transactions will be processed in Canadian dollars and are subject to current exchange rates.
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November 30th,
2018
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Workshop Venue:The meeting will take place in the SFU Harbour Centre, located near the waterfront in the downtown Vancouver core.
Accommodations:Delta Vancouver Suites:550 West Hastings St. (next to venue, 169 CAD/night + 17.5% tax)
Special rates apply to dates from January 22 to January 26, 2017. Last day to book: December 11, 2018. Quote "Simon Fraser University group booking" when calling Marriott Reservations at +1(844)254-5048 to get the above rate.Sandman Hotel Vancouver:180 West Georgia St. (10 mins walk, 99 CAD/night + 17.5% tax)
Special rates apply to dates from January 22 to January 27, 2017. Quote Group Number 1045355 when you call, or use the direct link get the above rate.
For your travel plans reference, the pre-workshop school will start at 9 am on Wednesday, January 23th. The workshop will start at 9 am on Thursday, January 24th and end on Saturday, January 26th. Conference dinner is planned for evening of Friday, January 25th. Arriving the evening before the meeting starts is probably the best way to schedule your travel, and you can stay a few extra days for a weekend in the city or on ski slopes. Further informaton about local attractions will be posted on local info page.
Getting to Vancouver:Vancouver International Airport (YVR) is well connected to major airports in Asia and Europe and cities throughout Canada and USA. Excellent deals, particularly from Europe, can often be found on holiday airlines, such as Air Transat and Thomas Cook. The best option for getting from YVR to the city is via Sky Train.Alternative Airports:Vancouver Harbour Flight Centre (CXH) is a seaplane terminal located within a 10 min walk from SFU Harbour Centre. An exciting option for people arriving from the University of Victoria, assuming the weather collaborates.Bellingham International Airport (BLI), across the US border, is about 85 km (53 miles) away from downtown Vancouver. Flying to BLI can be an inexpensive option if travelling from cities on the west coast of the US.Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (SEA) is 250 km (153 miles) away from downtown Vancouver. Flying to SEA can be a more economical option, even after taking the cost of the rental car into account.By Car:If you are coming from US by car, border crossing times depend on the time of the day. 10-20 mins wait is normal during non-peak times, but can easily be an hour if you happen to venture at the wrong time. You can get an idea about the crossing time statistics on various websites.By Ferry:BC Ferries runs several regular ferry lines connecting Vancouver Island to the Mainland. The closest terminal to downtown Vancouver is Tsawwassen. Although Horseshoe Bay terminal is not much further away, it is located on the North Shore. Connection over Lions Gate Bridge could be problematic during rush hour.
download printed directions or visit interactive map
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Places to Eat:SteamworksBonchazLa TaqueriaNubaEbisu on RobsonAkira SushiBanana LeafShizen YaCafe CrepeZefferelli'sThe NaamHealthy Noodle HouseVij'sPear TreeThings to Do:Harbour Centre TowerThe SeawallStanley ParkGranville IslandVancouver AquariumUBC Museum of AnthropologyFly Over CanadaCapilano Suspension BridgeGrouse Mountain GondolaVisit WhistlerGetting Around:Transit App for mobile devicesTransLink Vancouver websiteDownhill Skiing:Cypress MountainGrouse MountainMount SeymourWhistler BlackcombMt Baker Ski AreaX-Country Skiing:Cypress MountainCallaghan CountryBackcountry Skiing:check current avalanche conditions!
Wed Jan 23 - The School
08:00 Registration Desk OpensThu Jan 24 - Workshop Day 1
08:00 Registration Desk OpensFri Jan 25 - Workshop Day 2
08:30 Registration Desk OpensSat Jan 26 - Workshop Day 3
09:00 Registration Desk Opens
09:00-10:10 Dimitrios Psaltis Introduction to General Relativity and ways of testing it
08:55 Workshop Starts Welcome from organizers 09:00-09:30 Alessandra Buonanno New perspectives in black hole spectroscopy with gravitational-wave observations 09:30-10:00 Mark Trodden Extending the classical double copy 10:00-10:30 Eric Adelberger Eot-Wash update: fuzzy dark matter, equivalence principle tests, short-distance gravity and LIGO instrumentation
09:00-09:30 Justin Khoury Search optimization, self-organized criticality, and Higgs metastability 09:30-09:45 Clare Burrage Symmetron scalar fields: modified gravity, dark matter or both? 09:45-10:00 Jiro Murata Status and new idea of experimental tests of Newtonian gravity 10:00-10:15 Austin Joyce Shapes of gravity: graviton non-Gaussianity and heavy particles 10:15-10:30 Alexander Rider Testing gravity with optically levitated test masses
09:30-10:00 Alessandra Silvestri Lighting up Einstein's Dark Universe 10:00-10:30 Bhuvnesh Jain Gravitational lensing and current cosmological puzzles
10:30-11:40 Lam Hui The landscape of modified gravity theories 11:45-12:55 Nicolas Yunes Binary systems and gravitational waves
11:00-11:30 Cliff Burgess Effective applications of gravity: some surprises from EFT 11:30-12:00 Ruth Gregory Testing gravitational quantum tunneling 12:00-12:15 Niayesh Afshordi Quantum black holes in the sky 12:15-12:30 Jay Tasson The systematic search for Lorentz violation
11:00-11:30 Avery Broderick Mapping spacetimes with black hole cinema 11:30-11:45 Dimitrios Psaltis EHT update 11:45-12:15 Nicolas Yunes Can we probe Planckian corrections at the horizon scale with gravitational waves? 12:15-12:25 Tomas Galvez Towards a generalized Stefan–Boltzmann law for curved spacetime 12:25-12:35 Raúl Carballo-Rubio Testing the nature of black hole boundaries
11:00-11:20 Chukman So The ALPHA-g experiment 11:20-11:30 Douglas Scott Dimensionless cosmology and gravity 11:30-12:30 RAPID TALKS Session #2
Lunch Break
13:00-14:30 (various locations)Lunch Break
12:30-14:00 (various locations)Lunch Break
12:35-14:00 (various locations)Lunch Break
12:30-14:00 (various locations)
14:30-15:40 Jeremy Heyl Neutron stars and astrophysical tests of gravity
14:00-14:30 Hartmut Abele qBOUNCE, and an acoustic Ramsey-type gravity resonance spectrometer 14:30-15:00 Misao Sasaki Primordial black holes from inflation and gravitational waves 15:00-15:10 Florent Michel Simulating vacuum tunneling with cold atoms 15:10-15:20 Matthew Robbins Bose-Einstein condensates as gravitational wave detectors 15:20-15:30 John Lee Gravity below 50 micrometers
14:00-14:30 Manuela Campanelli Shedding light on binary supermassive black hole mergers 14:30-15:00 Ingrid Stairs Strong-field gravity with pulsars 15:00-15:30 Will Percival Testing gravity with galaxy surveys
14:00-14:15 Shinji Tsujikawa Galaxy-ISW constraints on dark energy models consistent with GW170817 14:15-14:25 Georgios Papadomanolakis The tachyon instability in scalar tensor theories 14:25-14:35 Jessica Muir Splitting growth and geometry to test ΛCDM with DES 14:35-14:45 Dimitry Ayzenberg RELXILL_NK: a non-Kerr extension of the RELXILL X-Ray reflection model 14:45-14:55 Andrius Tamošiūnas Testing emergent gravity on galaxy cluster scales 14:55-15:25 Lam Hui Symmetries in dark matter and black holes
16:00-17:10 Alessandra Silvestri Cosmological tests of gravity
16:00-16:10 Daniel Carney Tabletop experiments for quantum gravity 16:10-16:20 Heather Fong Latest results from Advanced LIGO and Virgo and outlook for the next observing run 16:20-16:30 Yoshio Kamiya Experimental search for new gravity-like forces in the nanometer scale with slow neutrons 16:30-16:40 Lia Medeiros Quantifying black hole images in non-Kerr metrics 16:40-16:50 Ilaria Caiazzo Shining black holes: testing gravity with Colibrì 16:50-17:00 Federico Urban Fuzzy dark matter and binary pulsars 17:00-18:00 RAPID TALKS Session #1
16:00-16:30 Mark Kasevich Testing gravity and quantum mechanics with atom interferometry 16:30-17:00 Mark Wise Primordial non-Gaussianities from quantum loops in de Sitter space and their impact on the large scale distribution of galaxies 17:00-17:30 Tanmay Vachaspati Classical quantum correspondence 17:30-17:45 Gabor Kunstatter Lost horizons: the dynamics of regular black hole formation and evaporation
16:00-16:10 Nelson Nunes Testing the equivalence principle with RadioAstron 16:10-16:20 Christian Arnold Simulating galaxy formation with the Illustris-TNG model in f(R) modified gravity 16:20-16:30 Alexander Mead Accurate non-linear power spectra calculations for modified gravity models using halo-model responses 16:30-16:40 Wenjuan Fang A new probe of gravity using the Minkowski functionals of large-scale structure 16:40-16:50 Marco Raveri Reconstructing gravity on cosmological scales 16:50-17:00 Levon Pogosian Conference Summary
Registration Open Until 19:00Poster Session and Reception 18:00-20:00 (snacks & cash bar)Conference Dinner
19:00 (Al Porto on Waterfront)
download full conference program or all talk and poster abstracts as PDF files for printing
Registered Participants:
Jahed Abedi (AEI)Hartmut Abele (TU Wien)Eric Adelberger (Washington)Niayesh Afshordi (Waterloo/Perimeter)Christian Arnold (ICC, Durham)Kellie Ault-O'Neal (Embry-Riddle Aeronautical)Dimitry Ayzenberg (Fudan)Sina Bahrami (PennState)Mario Ballardini (Western Cape)Jolyon Bloomfield (MIT)Matteo Braglia (Bologna)Avery Broderick (Waterloo)Alessandra Buonanno (AEI)Cliff Burgess (McMaster)Clare Burrage (Nottingham)Ilaria Caiazzo (UBC)Manuela Campanelli (RIT)Raúl Carballo-Rubio (SISSA)A. Cardenas-Avendano (Montana State)Michael Carlson (none)Daniel Carney (Maryland/Fermilab)Juan Cayuso (Perimeter)Ka-Wai Chung (CUHK)Omar Contigiani (Leiden)Brad Cownden (Manitoba)Meiling Deng (UBC)Michael Desrochers (UBC)Adam Dong (UBC)Benjamin Elder (Nottingham)Nathan Evetts (UBC)Jose María Ezquiaga (UAM)Wenjuan Fang (USTC)Sofia Fatigoni (UBC)Heather Fong (RESCEU, Tokyo)Andrei Frolov (SFU)Makoto Fujiwara (TRIUMF)Jose Tomas Galvez Ghersi (SFU)Chandrima Ganguly (Dartmouth College)Cisco Gooding (Nottingham)Julien Grain (IAS Orsay-France)Ruth Gregory (Durham)Shaun Heady (STCC)Cesar Hernandez Aguayo (ICC, Durham)Jeremy Heyl (UBC)Ryley Hill (UBC)Takashi Hiramatsu (Rikkyo)A. Miguel Holgado (Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)Lam Hui (Columbia)Bhuvnesh Jain (UPenn)Austin Joyce (Columbia)Yoshio Kamiya (Tokyo)Mark Kasevich (Stanford)Kamaldeep Kaur (TIET)Justin Khoury (UPenn)Demet Kirmizibayrak (UBC)Tsutomu Kobayashi (Rikkyo)Gabor Kunstatter (Winnipeg)Macarena Lagos (KICP, Chicago)John Lee (Washington)Elizabeth Loggia (UBC)Nicholas Loutrel (Princeton)Fiona McCarthy (Perimeter)Alexander Mead (UBC)Lia Medeiros (Arizona/UCSB)James Mertens (York/PI)Florent Michel (Durham)Salvatore Mignemi (Cagliari)Dave Miller (SFU)Myles Mitchell (ICC, Durham)Jacob Moldenhauer (Dallas)Jessica Muir (KIPAC/Stanford)Jiro Murata (Rikkyo)Ali Nezhadsafavi (SFU)Nils A. Nilsson (NCNR - Poland)Nelson Nunes (York)Henrique de Oliveira (UERJ)Zhen Pan (Perimeter)Georgios Papadomanolakis (Leiden)Manu Paranjape (Montréal)Simone Peirone (Leiden)Will Percival (Waterloo)Levon Pogosian (SFU)Dimitrios Psaltis (Arizona)Marco Raveri (KICP)Alexander Rider (Stanford)Matthew Robbins (Waterloo/Perimeter)Rachel A Rosen (Columbia)Michael Ross (Washington)Misao Sasaki (IPMU)Mathew Schneider (SFU)Douglas Scott (UBC)Naoki Seto (Kyoto)Anushrut Sharma (Pennsylvania)Erik Shaw (Washington)Alessandra Silvestri (Leiden)Chukman So (TRIUMF)Hajime Sotani (NAOJ)Ingrid Stairs (UBC)Raelyn Sullivan (UBC)Andrius Tamosiunas (ICG - Portsmouth)Jay Tasson (Carleton College)Kate Taylor (Victoria)Vasil Todorinov (Lethbridge)Mark Trodden (UPenn)Shinji Tsujikawa (TUS)Yukari Uchibori (SFU)Federico Urban (CEICO, Prague)Tanmay Vachaspati (Arizona State)Qingwen Wang (Perimeter)Mark Wise (Caltech)Tim Wiser (Truman State)Kei Yamada (Kyoto)Myungseok Yoon (Sangmyung)Zhang Yun-Long (YITP, Kyoto)Nico Yunes (Montana State)Tom Zlosnik (CEICO, Prague)Alex Zucca (SFU)