Associate Professor of Physics Seth Major traveled to the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada, for the workshop "Experimental Signatures of Quantum Gravity." Among some 25 attendees invited from around the world, Major presented a talk, "Discrete Geometry Phenomenology: New models, possible tests."
The talk included work with Michael Gregg '07 on a new mass limit for white dwarfs and Walter Schoen '07 on gravitational wave from the early universe. Many of the presentations concerned testing modifications to "dispersion relations," the equations that related energy end momentum. Major and Tomasz Konopka '02 contributed to the field in the early days by proposing a "phenomenological model" or test theory that might capture some quantum gravity effects. Highlights of the workshop included the announcement of Auger's new results.
See http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/09/science/space/09cosmic.html?ref=science and a report from Liberatti on new work that effectively rules out the modifications to dispersion relations that Major and Konopka considered. (Konopka was also at the meeting. He finished his Ph.D. this year and is now a postdoc at the Institute for Theoretical Physics of Utrecht University.)
The talk included work with Michael Gregg '07 on a new mass limit for white dwarfs and Walter Schoen '07 on gravitational wave from the early universe. Many of the presentations concerned testing modifications to "dispersion relations," the equations that related energy end momentum. Major and Tomasz Konopka '02 contributed to the field in the early days by proposing a "phenomenological model" or test theory that might capture some quantum gravity effects. Highlights of the workshop included the announcement of Auger's new results.
See http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/09/science/space/09cosmic.html?ref=science and a report from Liberatti on new work that effectively rules out the modifications to dispersion relations that Major and Konopka considered. (Konopka was also at the meeting. He finished his Ph.D. this year and is now a postdoc at the Institute for Theoretical Physics of Utrecht University.)
