First Chennai Symposium on Gravitation and Cosmology
January 22-24, 2020
The Symposium
Chennai presently has three major institutes that have research groups working in the areas of gravitation and cosmology: Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI), Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-M), and the Institute of Mathematical Sciences.
The first Chennai Symposium on Gravitation and Cosmology will be held at IIT-M during January 22-24, 2020. The aims of the Symposium can be said to be two-fold: (i) to showcase Chennai as an attractive destination for research in the areas of gravitation and cosmology, and (ii) to provide exposure to graduate students and post-doctoral fellows to the recent developments in these areas.
Due to constraints on accommodation, we are unable to encourage participants (other than the invited speakers) from outside Chennai. If you are from Chennai and are interested in attending the Symposium, please write to both the IIT-M members of the scientific organizing committee listed below by January 15. It is important that you write to us in time as we need to know the expected number of participants for logistical reasons.
The Symposium is supported by the Department of Physics and the Office of the Dean, International and Alumni Relations, IIT-M.
Scientific organizing committee
- K. G. Arun, CMI
- Dawood Kothawala, IIT-M
- Alok Laddha, CMI
- L. Sriramkumar, IIT-M
Local organizing committee (all from IIT-M)
- Sampurn Anand
- Ashmita Das
- K. Hari
- Suvashis Maity
- Chandra Kant Mishra
- Debottam Nandi
- Kaushik Paul
- H. V. Ragavendra
- Pankaj Saha
- L. Sriramkumar
- Sagarika Tripathy
Venue
The Symposium will be held in Hall 3 of the ICSR building. The ICSR building is right next to the Gajendra Circle on campus. The Brahmagupta Colloquium will be held in the Auditorium right opposite to Hall 3 in the ICSR building.
Schedule (click here to download a PDF file of the schedule)
Wednesday, January 22
| Time | Speaker | Title |
|---|---|---|
| 08:30-09:00 | Registration | |
| 09:00-09:15 | Inauguration | |
| 09:15-10:15 | Sayan Kar | Shadows, echoes and memory |
| 10:15-10:45 | Coffee break | |
| 10:45-11:45 | Sudipta Sarkar | Going beyond Einstein: Theoretical and observational constraints |
| 11:45-12:15 | Anand Sengupta | Unveiling the spectrum of inspiraling binary black holes |
| 12:15-12:45 | Debottam Nandi | Einstein or Jordan: Seeking answers from the reheating constraints |
| 12:45-14:00 | Lunch | |
| 14:00-15:00 | Suvrat Raju | A canonical view of holography |
| 15:00-15:30 | Debika Chowdhury | Initial conditions for inflation |
| 15:30-15:50 | H. V. Ragavendra | Just enough inflation |
| 15:50-16:10 | Karthik Rajeev | Generalized Schwinger effect and cosmological particle production |
| 16:10-16:30 | Aneesh P. B. | Conserved charges in asymptotically de Sitter spacetimes |
| 16:30-17:00 | High tea | |
| 17:00-18:00 | Bala Iyer | Brahmagupta Colloquium: Experiments driving theory: The two-body problem in general relativity |
Thursday, January 23
| Time | Speaker | Title |
|---|---|---|
| 09:00-10:00 | Anshuman Maharana | Inflation in string theory |
| 10:00-10:30 | T. R. Govindarajan | What if photon has a mass? |
| 10:30-11:00 | Coffee break | |
| 11:00-12:00 | Nishikanta Khandai | Cosmological hydrodynamical simulations of structure formation |
| 12:00-13:00 | Sukanta Bose | What can GWs tell us about the densest form of matter, the universe's expansion and extra dimensions? |
| 13:00-14:00 | Lunch | |
| 14:00-15:00 | Amitabh Virmani | QNMs of exotic compact objects |
| 15:00-15:30 | P. Ajith | Gravitational lensing of gravitational waves |
| 15:30-16:00 | Coffee break | |
| 16:00-16:30 | Shasvath Kapadia | Compact binary merger rates from LIGO-Virgo’s first and second observing runs |
| 16:30-17:00 | M. Saleem | Multi-messenger astronomy using GWs |
Friday, January 24
| Time | Speaker | Title |
|---|---|---|
| 09:00-10:00 | Chandra Kant Mishra | Testing general relativity using gravitational waves |
| 10:00-10:30 | Sumanta Chakraborty | Strong cosmic censorship conjecture |
| 10:30-11:00 | Coffee break | |
| 11:00-12:00 | Shiv Sethi | Cosmological implications of alternative dark matter |
| 12:00-12:30 | Bidisha Chakrabarty | Non-linear Langevin dynamics via holography |
| 12:30-13:00 | Shubroneel Chakrabarti | Generalized Garfinkle-Vachaspati transformation with dilaton |
| 13:00-14:00 | Lunch | |
| 14:00-15:00 | Archana Pai | Updates from LIGO-Virgo observing runs |
| 15:00-15:20 | Divyajyoti | Astrophysics of higher order modes |
| 15:20-15:40 | Sayantani Datta | Parameterized tests of general relativity with multi-band observations of gravitational waves |
| 15:40-16:00 | Pankaj Saha | On the equation of state during reheating |
| 16:00-17:00 | Vote of thanks, followed by coffee | |
Participants
Click here to download a file containing the complete list of participants.
Instructions for participants
Click here to download a file containing essential instructions related to arrival, departure, accommodation and food.