Noticia

In the year 2024 the UV-QG group has initiated a collaboration with members of three African institutions: the University of Cape Town and North-West University, from South Africa, and The British University in Egypt, from Egypt (obviously). This collaboration is possible thanks to the economic support of the internationalization program i-COOP of CSIC through the grant COOPB23096. This initiative is aligned with the commitment of members of the UV-QG group to contribute to the strengthening of the scientific-technical training capacities of developing countries, facilitating scientific exchanges and internships at the Department of Theoretical Physics & IFIC, a joint research center of the University of Valencia and the Spanish Research Council (CSIC). 

As part of the activities of this project, in June 5-6 of the current year 2024 we are organizing a workshop to discuss about compact objects and metric-affine gravity, which will hopefully serve as a starting point for new research and collaborations among the participants. In this first meeting, we will have the participation of the coordinators from the three involved foreign institutions: Dr. Álvaro de la Cruz Dombriz (UCT),  Dr. Amare Abebe Gidelew (NWU), and Dr. Gamal G. Lamee Nashed (BUE).

The workshop will be held at the Seminar Room of the Department of Theoretical Physics of the University of Valencia (Burjassot Campus) in hybrid format to facilitate the remote participation and attendance of the national and international community working in the field of compact objects, metric-affine geometry, and modified theories of gravity. As usual, all talks and discussions will be broadcast live via our YouTube channel. If you are interested in participating in the live sessions, let us know by email (at gonzalo.olmo@uv.es with subject "i-COOP meeting") to receive the corresponding ZOOM link. 

The main topic of the workshop revolves around the notion of compact astrophysical objects and this will give us the opportunity to present a Mathematica code developed by G.J. Olmo, D. Rubiera-Garcia, and J.L Rosa to study the optical appearance of spherically symmetric objects. The code is called GRAVITYp, which stands for Geodesic Rays and Visualization of IntensiTY profiles. An overview of the main concepts involved in the analysis of intensity profiles will be given by D. Rubiera-García, G.J. Olmo will provide an introductory discussion of the inner workings of the code, and a more advanced application will be presented by J.L. Rosa.  

Besides our colleagues from UCT, NWU, and BUE, the workshop will count with the participation of Dr. Adrià Delhom (LSU, USA), Dr. Ángel Rincón (UA, Spain), Dr. Adrián Casado Turrión (UCM, Spain), João Luís Rosa (Gdansk U., Poland), Dr. Leandro Lessa (UFC, Brazil), Dr. Diego Rubiera-García (UCM, Spain), and the PhD students Javier Marañón (UV-CSIC), José Perdiguero (UV-CSIC) and Renan B. Magalhães (UFPA).  

About our special guests: 

Amare Abebe: after completing his postgraduate training specialising in gravitation and cosmology at the University of Cape Town, Amare Abebe joined the North-West University as a postdoctoral research fellow in 2014 and has remained there ever since, where he is now a professor of physics. His research interests and experience include cosmological perturbations and large-scale structure formation, especially in the context of modified gravity theories. More recent interests include interacting dark fluid cosmological models and tensions in cosmology.

 

Álvaro de la Cruz Dombriz: Since August 2015, Álvaro (Aranjuez, 1980) has been a Faculty Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and a member of the UCT Astrophysics, Cosmology and Gravity Centre (ACGC) at UCT. Previously, awarded a PhD at the Complutense University of Madrid (2010, Summa cum Laude) on theoretical and observational constraints in extended theories of gravity. Subsequently held a postdoctoral fellow post at the UCT Cosmology and Gravity group and obtained a Marie Curie postdoctoral contract at the ICE-IEEC Barcelona. Also, since 2021 he has been a "Beatriz Galindo" Distinguished Senior Fellow at the University of Salamanca (Spain).

Álvaro’s publications include more than 60 peer-reviewed articles with seminal contributions in the areas of cosmological large-scale structures, foundations of theories beyond Einsteinian gravity, particularly on Scalar-Tensor gravity theories, and indirect methods of dark matter detections.

To date, Álvaro has been a member of the scientific teams for twenty research funded projects. Since 2016 he has been a member of two running EU-COST actions and along the course of his career he has been the Principal Investigator (PI) for ten funded research projects in both Europe and South Africa.

In 2017 he was appointed as an Associate in the SKA Cosmology and Gravitational Waves collaboration and was honoured with the Young Researcher Award, (UCT College of Fellows, 2017) and the Claude Leon Foundation Merit Award for Early-career Researchers (2018).

Dr. Gamal G.L. Nashed: He got his PhD in 1998 from Saitama university (Tokyo, Japan) on theoretical physics (energy and momentum in modified theories). After finishing his Ph.D,  has been a Faculty  staff  in the Department of Mathematics  at the University of  Ain Shams University (Cairo, Egypt) since 1998 till 2012. Since 2012, he became a member of the Centre of Theoretical Physics specialized in deriving black hole solutions in modified theories of gravity such as f(T), f(R), f(G), etc.  He has published more than 190 peer-reviewed papers with groundbreaking contributions in the field of black holes, specially discussing  horizons, multi-horizons, thermodynamics, and other related aspects. 

Access to the videos on our YouTube channel:

The workshop programme appears below. Click on each item for more information (do not forget to select the dates of the meeting to see the schedule).  

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:

• Flavio Bombacigno. 
• Adrián del Río Vega.
• Javier Marañón.
• Gonzalo J. Olmo.

Photo of this post by kylefromthenorth on Unsplash.