The standard cosmological model is ΛCDM, in which the dominant dark energy component of the energy density of the universe is assumed to be a cosmological constant term, which is of the same form as quantum vacuum energy. This suggests that quantum effects may be relevant at cosmological scales, and leads to possible viable alternative models, which may soon be testable with increasingly more detailed data. At the same time the direct detection of gravitational waves by LIGO has ushered in the era of gravitational wave and multi-messenger astronomy, which allow Einstein’s classical General Relativity to be put through more stringent tests in strong gravitational fields and finally probe possible quantum effects in extreme compact stars and black holes.The subject of the one-week topical workshop will be quantum effects in gravitation and cosmology, in particular, focusing on the following issues:
- Conformal Invariance, the Conformal Anomaly, and Applications of the Effective Action of the Trace Anomaly to Cosmology;
- The a and c Theorems and Application of Renormalization Group Methods to Gravity and Cosmology;
- Gravitational Condensates, Dynamical Vacuum Energy and Tests of the ΛCDM Model;
- Quantum Effects in Black Holes, Quantum Information, and Prospects for Observational Tests of Black Hole Physics with Gravitational Waves by aLIGO;
- Gravitational Stability of the Standard Model Higgs Field at High Energies and in Inflation.
The following are Confirmed Participants at the Workshop:
- Bartelmann, Matthias
- Barvinsky, Andrei
- Coriano, Claudio
- Dvali, Giorgi
- Emelyanov, Slava
- Glavan, Drazen
- Ketov, Sergey
- Lopez Nacir, Diana
- Maglio, Matteo Maria
- Modesto, Leonardo
- Oshita, Naritaka
- Peter, Patrick
- Pirozhenko, Irina
- Popov, Fedor
- Prokopec, Tomislav
- Rachwal, Leslaw
- Ramos, Rudnei
- Reuter, Martin
- Skenderis, Kostas
- Starobinsky, Alexei
- Stergiou, Andreas
- Theisen, Stefan
- Turok, Neil
- Zanusso, Omar
