Flying around

I attended a very interesting conference last week in Mexico:  5th Garcia-Colin Mexican Meeting on Mathematical & Experimental Physics and ended up being interviewed at the press conference!

At the press conference of the 5th Garcia Colin -Mexican Meeting on Mathematical & Experimental Physic.

As I listened to the talks I realized how important the presentation of data was. The numerical relativity talks, with videos of merging black holes were definitely eye catching. As I searched the webs to find out which "outer-space" experiments are currently running I found this very cool chart called "Spacial awareness: Ultimate guide to exploring space" where the information is compiled beautifully.

Before ending this post let me just mention (as promised) that last week's journal club@ Harvard was led by Ben Heindereich. He talked about "Dimers and Orientifolds " based on http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.0298.

Journal Clubs - Harvard 2013/2014 edition

In all the research institutions I have worked at, Journal Clubs (JCs) are regularly organized aside from the usual seminars. JCs are weekly group meetings to discuss different papers listed recently on the arXiv. This year I am in charge of the organization of the Harvard High Energy Theory Journal Club. Today we had our own Babak Haghighat telling us about the connection of the rational CFTs to the torsion elements of the Bloch group. There was a lot of pizza and discussion; we hope to keep it up in the upcoming meetings.
Hope to report on the blog weekly about our upcoming JC meetings.

Black holes went hicking.

Several weeks of conferences and workshops are over and the coolest excursions including black hole physics discussions on the top of the Pyrenees (see picture) and copious meals of legendary lamb also came to an end.

String Theory Workshop 2013:
near Benasque, Spain at 2.400 meters in the Pyrenees.

There are currently many subjects in the spotlight, but judging from the number of talks at the most recent meetings the stress is on black holes -- or perhaps black hole alternatives? These include not only the so called fuzzball proposals, but also the recently proposed firewalls. On the latter subject there were at least three talks at Strings 2013! (click here to watch online) 

More discussions on these enlarged circle of ideas on the black hole information problem will go on at KITP mini workshop in a couple of weeks "Black Holes: Complementarity, Fuzz or Fire?" and programm.

What do String Theorists do over the Summer?

We held yesterday the last String Journal Club of the semester, and have two more weeks of seminars to officially start Summer-term at Harvard.  But for many, specially the senior faculty, this is the start of the most exciting period of the year: the summer Workshops and Conferences. The 2013 edition of the Strings Conference is in Korea and there are at least twelve other international meetings in June/July going on at the same time. Among them, the two week String Theory Workshop in Benasque-Spain starting the 30th of June. That is my choice for the summer, not just beacuse I am co-organizing it, but because it has been a great opportunity to discuss about physics and start new collaborations.



If you have no plans for the upcoming months you are welcome to apply. The deadline for the application is 1st of May (today!). Hope to see you all there.