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The 10th International Conference on Gravitation and Cosmology (ICGC) will be hosted by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati, India during December 6 - 9, 2023. Since its inception in 1987, ICGC meetings are held once in four years and are organized by the Indian Association for General Relativity and Gravitation (IAGRG). The tenth edition of this conference at IIT Guwahati aims to bring together experts working in the area of Gravitation and Cosmology to discuss the recent developments, present status and exchange ideas while providing young researchers from India an opportunity for interaction with experts. The programme will have a series of plenary lectures, with parallel and poster sessions.
In addition, this year, we are celebrating the birth-centenary year of Prof. Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri, a renowned relativist well-known for the Raychaudhuri equation. One special evening session will be organized in this meeting.
Another evening session will be organized to remember Prof. Thanu Padmanabhan and his invaluable contributions to gravitational physics.
I will argue that if black holes represent one the most fascinating implications of Einstein’s theory of gravity, neutron stars in binary system are its richest laboratory, where gravity blends with astrophysics and particle physics. I will discuss the rapid recent progress made in modelling these systems and show how the gravitational signal can provide tight constraints on the equation of state and sound speed for matter at nuclear densities, as well as on one of the most important consequences of general relativity for compact stars: the existence of a maximum mass. Finally, I will discuss how the merger may lead to a phase transition from hadronic to quark matter. Such a process would lead to a signature in the post-merger gravitational-wave signal and open an observational window on the production of quark matter in the present Universe.
Gravity is usually regarded classically, obeying Newton's law or Einstein's equations. Here I will show that, when the gravitational field is treated quantum-mechanically, the classical trajectories of freely falling objects are subject to random fluctuations, or "noise". Intuitively, the fluctuations can be viewed as arising due to the bombardment of the falling object by gravitons. This fundamental noise might even be observable at gravitational wave detectors and, if detected, would provide experimental evidence for the quantization of gravity. I will also show that, when these results are extended to congruences of geodesics, the quantum fluctuations of spacetime give rise to an additional term in the Raychaudhuri equation.
We are in the era of gravitational-wave and multi-messenger astronomy. The latest catalog of transient events from LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA contains 90 high-confidence detections from the first three observing runs. The ongoing fourth observing run is yielding a steady stream of events, with public alerts being issued at a rate of approximately 2-3 per week. All observations are believed to originate from merging neutron stars and/ or black holes, and are providing new insights into the properties and origins of compact objects and binaries. In this talk, I will provide a summary of the key observations to date, highlighting what we can learn about the astrophysics of compact objects. I will also discuss what these observations mean for the future when LIGO India comes online, expanding the global detector network and ushering in an even brighter era of gravitational-wave astronomy.
AstroSat, India's first multi-wavelength space observatory is an unique platform to observe cosmic X-ray sources, especially to probe the strong gravity of 'compact' objects. I will discuss the capabilities of AstroSat and present some interesting results to decipher the environment around the 'compact' objects.
In this talk, I will provide a brief overview of regular spacetimes in theories of gravity. In particular, I will primarily review some of the well--known regular black holes and also discuss wormholes and bubble spacetimes. Some recent results, as well as physical effects in such spacetimes will be mentioned. We will end with
general comments and open questions.
Mapping the baryonic content of the Universe, especially after the epoch of Cosmic Dawn -- the birth of the first stars and galaxies --- promises rich insights into both astrophysics and cosmology. The technique of intensity mapping (IM) has emerged as a powerful tool to explore this phase of the Universe by measuring the integrated emission from sources over a broad range of frequencies. A particular advantage of IM is that it provides a tomographic, or three-dimensional picture of the Universe, unlocking significantly more information than we presently have from galaxy surveys. Astrophysical uncertainties, however, constitute an important systematic in our attempts to constrain cosmology with IM. I describe an innovative approach which allows us to fully utilize our current knowledge of astrophysics in order to develop cosmological forecasts from IM. Analytically driven extensions to this framework allow us to interpret the latest auto-correlation IM results from the MeerKAT facility, as well as its counterparts in the microwave and sub-millimetre regimes. The framework can be used to exploit synergies with other complementary surveys, thereby opening up the fascinating possibility of constraining physics beyond Lambda CDM from future IM observations.
A rapidly emerging messenger in astrophysics is gravitational waves (GWs). A new window in the GW spectrum was recently opened when emerging evidence for ultra-long wavelength or nanoHertz frequency GWs was reported by four major pulsar timing array experiments (PTAs). These experiments use a collection of widely separated pulsars in the sky to look for a characteristic spectrum and spatial correlation due to an isotropic stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB) believed to originate by the superposition of continuous gravitational waves emitted by an ensemble of gravitational radiation dominated in-spiralling super-massive black hole binary systems. A review of these experiments in the context of SGWB will be presented in this talk followed by a discussion of results of joint analysis by Indo-Japanese pulsar timing array (InPTA) and European pulsar timing array (EPTA) collaboration. These results will be examined in the context of similar results from Parkes pulsar timing array (PPTA), North American nanoHertz Observatory for gravitational waves (NANOgrav) and Chinese pulsar timing array (CPTA). Results from a recent comparison of these results jointly by International pulsar timing array (IPTA) will be presented, which suggests a higher significance detection after combining data from all the experiments. Recent efforts in improving the noise models with low frequency data and challenges in IPTA data combination will be described. Finally, the talk concludes with a brief look at possible new astrophysics, where the PTA data as well as multi-messenger astronomy is likely to contribute significantly in developing the field of gravitation and cosmology.
The evolution and growth of the skeleton of the Cosmic Web goes hand-in-hand with the evolution of gas and galaxies in the Universe and intertwines primordial physics (the details of inflation, dark matter and dark energy) with astrophysics (reionization, star formation and the growth of black holes). Untangling this correlated evolution in order to use the Cosmic Web as a cosmological probe requires a judicial use of theoretical techniques ranging from perturbation theory and non-linear analytical approximations to semi-numerical models to full-fledged numerical simulations of dark matter, gas and galaxies. Such techniques are critical in understanding the degeneracies between cosmology and astrophysics that are imprinted on any given astrophysical probe of cosmology. I will discuss some of the progress in this field over the last several years, highlighting a few different themes from the literature. At low redshifts, I will discuss the emerging importance of uncertain physical effects such as galaxy assembly bias and the role played by novel statistical probes of nonlinear structure. At high redshifts, I will briefly describe the development of accurate and fast tools for capturing the physics of reionization. Finally, I will showcase our recent efforts at distinguishing the `standard' Lambda-CDM model from alternative theories.
Gravitational Waves are the periodic stretching and contracting of space-time produced by rotating astrophysical objects possessing a finite quadrupole moment such as binary stars, binary neutron stars, neutron star-black hole binary or black-hole-black-hole binary, etc. A passing gravitational wave will modulate the distance between two inertial test masses albeit by a very miniscule amount. Gravitational waves can be detected by measuring these minuscule changes using techniques such as resonant bars, resonant spheres, interferometric measurement, etc. Of these the interferometer detector is most promising due to it broadband sensitivity and scalability in size. The Michelson interferometer is a 'natural' detector of gravitational waves because of the differential changes in its two orthogonal arms induced by the quadruple field of the gravitational waves. As the displacement of two mirrors separated by a distance L, scales with the distance interferometer detector with arm length of kms is required to be able to detect Gravitational waves. Two such km class detectors are the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors in the US, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, separated by about three thousand kilometers. The third detector labeled LIGO-India is being setup in India under a joint collaboration between NSF and DAE-DST. The talk will provide a brief overview of the LIGO-India Project, it’s current status and plans for it’s upgrades to “arrive” in the global network of Gravitational Wave Detectors with an optical configuration similar to the other two LIGO detectors. The various activities on the Indian side for the LIGO-India Project will be presented in detail. The activities and plans for contributing to the next generation Gravitational Wave detector and a possible deci-Hz Gravitational Wave detector in space will also be discussed briefly.
Over the past decades, observations have established a sample of more than 200 bright Active galactic nuclei (AGN), powered by accretion onto massive black holes, in the first billion years of the Universe. The James Webb Space Telescope has significantly revised this sample by yielding a sample of unexpectedly numerous and large black holes (up to a 100 million solar masses) within the first 600 million years, posing an enormous challenge for black hole and galaxy formation models. Starting with possible pathways for creating such heavy black holes in the early Universe, I will show a census of the black holes and their properties expected through cosmic time. I will use these to highlight the gravitational wave event rates expected to be detected by LISA (the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna). Straddling the fields of cosmology, galaxy formation and black hole physics, I will show how theoretical models that couple the evolution of dark matter halos, their baryonic components and their black holes are crucially required to make predictions for facilities such as LISA.
In this talk I will discuss the challenges and prospects of Gravitational-wave Paleontology: studying massive stars from their `remnants’ as compact object coalescences, with the goal to answer the key questions in gravitational-wave astronomy today: What can we learn from these gravitational-wave sources about the formation, lives, and explosive deaths of massive stars across cosmic time? How do we unravel the gravitational-wave formation channels? I will discuss open challenges in gravitational waves including the “Uncertainty Challenge” and give an overview of current efforts in the field to overcome this.
Einstein’s equations are a set of classical differential equations for gravity with maximum two space-time derivatives. Black holes are some singular solutions to Einstein’s equations. They behave like large thermodynamic objects, indicating that they are actually an ensemble of the quantum states of gravity. Now any consistent quantum completion of Einstein’s theory typically generates several higher derivative corrections. Therefore we expect that black holes will continue to satisfy the laws of thermodynamics even after adding the quantum gravity induced corrections to Einstein’s equation. In this talk, we would like to see to what extent we could prove this expectation.
Since the Nobel winning discovery of gravitational waves (GWs) by the LIGO-Virgo-Kagra (LVK) detectors from merging compact object binaries, understanding the various astrophysical formation channels of these sources has come to sharp focus. While qualitatively, the processes involved in producing these astrophysical systems are well understood, cutting-edge research is underway to put better constraints on several uncertain aspects that can affect the distribution of properties and expected rate of mergers depending on the formation channel. I will give a brief overview of the various formation channels, their unique characteristics, and the major sources of uncertainties. I will give a broad overview of the current state-of-the art of our theoretical understanding and predictions and discuss possible ways forward, using GWs in different frequency bands with future and upgraded detectors, and using other ongoing and upcoming electromagnetic surveys that can provide the key ingredients to better model GW sources.
The physics of gravitational waves is well understood for asymptotically flat space-times. Asymptotic flatness presumes a vanishing cosmological constant. However, cosmological observations over the decades have indicated that our universe is undergoing an accelerated expansion, which is most simply modelled by a de Sitter universe or equivalently by a positive cosmological constant. Even a tiniest value of positive cosmological constant profoundly alters the asymptotic structure of space-times, forcing a re-look at the theory of gravitational radiation. We will present an overview of the study of gravitational radiation in the de Sitter universe. We will discuss the progress and state-of-the-art of the subject.
Universe has several poorly constrained periods over its evolution. Formation of first stars and galaxies, followed by reionization of the intergalactic medium is one such epoch. Often referred to as "cosmic dawn", observing this period is extremely challenging due to the faint nature of the signals originating from it. The redshifted 21-cm line from neutral hydrogen offers one such possibility to observe the cosmic dawn and extract information about the nature of first stars and galaxies. In this talk, I will discuss our attempts at detecting the 21-cm signal from cosmic dawn. I will elaborate the challenges involved in detecting faint cosmological signals, and how our in-house designed experiments address those challenges. I will finally discuss the recent results from our observations, and explore how 21-cm signal can also be employed to probe other epochs at different redshifts.
Nearly all of the previous gravitational wave (GW) searches in the LIGO-Virgo-Kagra (LVK) data include GW waveforms with only the dominant quadrupole mode, i.e., omitting higher-order harmonics such as the octupole which are predicted by general relativity. We improved our search pipeline by introducing higher harmonics in the GW templates, and downweighting noise transients (“glitches”) to improve the search sensitivity to high-mass binary black hole (BBH) mergers. We searched over the public LVK data from the third observing run (O3) and used the detection threshold as the astrophysical probability being over 0.5 (following the approach of the LVK catalogs). This led to the detection of 13 new BBH merger events. Some of the new events have interesting astrophysical properties such as populating the pair instability mass gap in the black hole (BH) mass distribution and high redshift. While our new events individually have modest false alarm rates (>~ 1/yr), combining all the 13 events with their respective pastro values could have an impact on population analysis studies (e.g., probing the evolution of mass and spin distribution of BHs with redshift).
Temporal evolution in low-energy fundamental constants such as the fine structure constant and the proton-electron mass ratio is a generic prediction of theories that attempt to unify the Standard Model of particle physics and general relativity. The exciting possibility of low-energy tests of such unification theories has inspired a number of methods to probe fundamental constant evolution on a range of timescales, from years to billions of years. Astrophysical studies of redshifted spectral lines provide a powerful probe of such putative changes in the low-energy fundamental constants across a large fraction of the age of the Universe. After reviewing the current state of the field, I will describe new high-sensitivity results on changes in the proton-electron mass ratio over the last 8 Gyr using methanol radio spectral transitions. Finally, if time permits, I will discuss present limitations of such studies and the improvements that are likely to be possible with the advent of new experimental and observational facilities over the next decade.
Compact binaries observed in gravitational waves (GWs) are standard distance indicators or standard sirens. This has opened up a novel path to measuring cosmological parameters such as the Hubble constant. In this talk we give a brief overview of the current results in this context from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA detector network, some of the near-future prospects, and finally move over to the unique opportunities offered by future GW observatories.
X-rays are the signatures of the high-energy Universe. The X-ray band probes extreme environments in the Universe, such as those near black holes or the surface of neutron stars. Observations in X-ray energies of the sky provides the opportunity to study such exotic objects in the Universe, allowing the exploration of physical processes in extreme conditions. Many space missions and instruments were realized since 1960s that contributed to the present understanding of the physics of various astronomical sources. A steady progress in technological development has put X-ray astronomy in the mainstay of astronomy and astrophysics. In this talk, I will provide an overview of the observational X-ray astronomy as well as current and future X-ray missions that have provided some path breaking scietific results to shed new lights on the nature of various astronomical sources as well as the physical mechanisms by which the X-rays are emitted. I will also briefly mention about India's first X-ray polarimetry instrument POLIX onboard XpoSat satellite that will soon be launched.