Encuentros Relativistas Españoles - Spanish Relativity Meeting

This international conference is organized by the University of Salamanca and will take place from 15th to 19th September, 2008 at the Hospedería Fonseca Conference Center in Salamanca, Spain.

The Spanish Relativity Meeting (ERE) is an international conference devoted to Relativity and Gravitation which is organized every year by one of the Spanish groups working in this area. It is supported by the Spanish Society of Gravitation and Relativity (SEGRE) .

The EREs started in 1977 with the main objective of promoting scientific discussion and interchange of knowledge in relativity and gravitation in a relaxed atmosphere. Over the years, the conference has gained international recognition and has attracted an increasing number of participants from many different countries. The conference is nowadays a relevant international event in this field, and has fortunately maintained substantially the original relaxed atmosphere with which it started. A list of previous meetings and a short history of the EREs can be found here .

The primary objective of the ERE is to promote contacts between experts in the field in all topics of Relativity and Gravitation. However, each year the conference has a topic which is treated more in-depth. The Spanish Relativity Meeting 2008 will put the emphasis on the theoretical aspects of gravitation. As everyone knows, gravity is one of the physical theories where the mathematical aspects are most relevant. A rigorous treatment of the basic problems of gravitation has been perceived as more and more necessary by the community. This fact has attracted the interest of theoretical physicists and mathematicians and a fruitful collaboration has developed over the years into what has been termed "mathematical relativity", which has become a very active field of research in the last decades. One of the aims of ERE 2008 is to bring together experts in this field who will present and discuss their latest developments. A second fundamental objective is to bring some of the topics treated in this area, which are sometimes somewhat technical, closer to a wider audience of scientists working in different topics of relativity and gravitation.

Theoretical aspects of gravitation in connection with fundamental particle and field theoretical physics will also be treated in this conference. The planned start-up of the Large Hadronic Collider (LCH) at CERN in the fall 2008 may open up a new window to gravitational physics and allow the possibility to test some intriguing aspects of gravitation, like the possible formation and evaporation of tiny black holes in particle accelerators.

Last but not least, cosmology and relativistic astrophysics are at present one of the most active research areas in gravitation. The planned launch of the satellite Planck on the 31st of July 2008 will represent a crucial step forward in our understanding of the cosmic microwave radiation and hence of the evolving Universe.

Some of the topics that will be discussed are:

• Gravitational collapse and the cosmic censorship conjecture
• Quasi-local mass and applications
• Black hole uniqueness theorems in four and higher dimensions
• Marginally trapped surfaces and dynamical horizons
• Singularity theorems and applications
• Stationary gravitational fields
• Holography and AdS/CFT correspondence
• Black hole physics
• Cosmology and cosmic background radiation
• Relativistic hydrodynamics

Despite the presence of a guiding topic, the Spanish Relativity Meeting is intended to serve as a forum where all subjects in relativity and gravitation can be discussed. Participants are encouraged to send their contributions to this conference. Contributed talks will be grouped according to their topic and scheduled in two parallel sessions in the afternoon. See Abstract Submission for more details.

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