Talks

The fact that the Einstein-Hilbert action, by itself, does not lead to a well-posed variational principle has become textbook knowledge. It can be made well-posed by the addition of suitable boundary terms. There are many boundary terms available in the literature, of which the most famous and most widely used is the Gibbons-Hawking-York (GHY) boundary term. The GHY term is ostensibly defined only for a non-null boundary. There have been very few efforts in the literature to extend its definition to null boundaries. The speaker will present his group's work towards finding a boundary term to render the Einstein-Hilbert action well-posed in the presence of null boundaries. He shall discuss a proposed boundary term, associated boundary conditions, outstanding issues and possible applications.

Gravitational waves, as predicted by Einstein one hundred years ago, have been detected by the advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in September last year. This finding marks the beginning of gravitational-wave astronomy. From now on, we are able to probe our universe using both long-range forces in nature. 

In the foreseeable future, the gravitational wave astronomy will be exponentially growing, with more detectors targeting gravitational waves at different frequencies and more events detected every week. This will provide us great opportunities but also impose challenges as well. In the first part of my talk, I will discuss the physics of gravitational wave detectors, emphasizing its basic principles and dominant noise sources, as well as ongoing efforts to improve detector sensitivity to fulfill the growing need. In the second half of my talk, I will discuss the astrophysics of gravitational-wave sources - especially compact sources such as black holes and neutron stars. I shall explain the spacetime dynamics, gravitational-wave emission during compact binary mergers and possible electromagnetic radiation from these compact objects. In the next few years with new gravitational-wave observations and possible electromagnetic counterpart measurements, we may dramatically improve our understandings on the astrophysics of these sources.

I will present recent result on constructing effective quantum gravity theory as a locally covariant QFT. The approach I advocate uses the BV formalism for dealing with the gauge freedom and Epstein-Glaser renormalization to control the UV divergences. I will show how gauge invariant observables that satisfy a weak notion of locality can be constructed in this framework and I will sketch the argument for perturbative background independence. Recently these ideas were applied to models relevant in cosmology.