Conveners
Gravitation and Cosmology: I
- Jerome Quintin (University of Waterloo and Perimeter Institute)
Gravitation and Cosmology: II
- Nassim Bozorgnia (University of Alberta)
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Serge Hamoudou (McMaster University)19/06/2026, 09:45Relativity, Gravitation and CosmologyContributed Talk
It is well known that in the bulk of a background electromagnetic field, photons and gravitons convert into one another. This phenomenon is known as the Gertsenshtein effect. I use this result to examine what happens at a boundary separating a vacuum region from a background electromagnetic field, and I find that up to 34 % of an incoming gravitational wave's energy can get reflected and...
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Jean-Simon Côté (Université Laval)19/06/2026, 10:05Relativity, Gravitation and CosmologyContributed Talk
Gravitational-wave astronomy has opened a new observational window onto extreme astrophysical phenomena such as black-hole and neutron-star mergers. While current and next-generation interferometric detectors are primarily sensitive to the low-frequency regime, high-frequency gravitational waves (HFGWs) provide a promising probe of physics beyond the Standard Model, since no known conventional...
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Varun Muralidharan (McGill University)19/06/2026, 10:25Relativity, Gravitation and CosmologyContributed Talk
Motivated by recent results from the DESI collaboration, we explore two classes of quintessence models that can give rise to crossing of the dark energy equation of state through the “phantom divide” (w=−1). These are models with Lagrangians that involve higher powers of the kinetic energy, or where the dark matter (DM) mass is a function of ϕ. Both have similar features with respect to the...
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Batia Friedman-Shaw20/06/2026, 09:45Relativity, Gravitation and CosmologyContributed Talk
Recent Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) results have garnered attention from the cosmology community due to tension with the $\Lambda$CDM cosmological model when combined with cosmic microwave background (CMB) data. The tension suggests that a new model for dark energy may be warranted. Current alternative models focus mainly on a time-varying component of dark energy due in part to...
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Dr Farrukh Ahmed Chishtie20/06/2026, 10:05Strings and Quantum GravityContributed Talk
I present the Unified Standard Model with Emergent Gravity-Effective Field Theory (USMEG-EFT), demonstrating for the first time a consistent unification of four-dimensional general relativity with the Standard Model within a fully renormalizable effective field theory framework. The approach employs a Lagrange multiplier field that enforces Einstein's equations at the path-integral level,...
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Dia Kalra (University of Alberta)Relativity, Gravitation and CosmologyContributed Talk
We analyze the line ratio of the 13CO(2–1) to 12CO(2–1) rotational transitions observed from new Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array observations of 100 Giant Molecular Clouds that span the Large Magellanic Cloud. We measure a median line ratio of 13CO(2–1)/12CO(2–1) = 0.078 with 68% of the sample falling between 0.058 and 0.107. A regression analysis confirms a nearly linear...
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