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November 21, 2025 past

PUG Seminar

Whitmore 321

PUG Seminar

Abstract: The problem of quantum Gravity has been one of the forefronts of physics research for nearly half a century. There have been many attempts to develop a fully quantum description of the gravitional force and so far, none of them have been proven to be "the one". In this talk I will lay out the coneptual foundation of one of these attempts, Loop Quantum Gravity, and describe how it attempts to solve the problems that arise in classical, and perturbative quantum gravity.

Program

Date Time Speaker Title
2025-11-21 11:00 Samarth Khandelwal A Conceptual Voyage into Loop Quantum Gravity
About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.