Corfu School starts next week, what can we learn from the lineup?

[marcus]

The list of seminar and workshop talks has just been posted for the Corfu QG School that starts Monday 14 September, one week from today. This school has been designed by the ESF (Eur. Sci. Found.)'s QG arm to help get young researchers (PhD students and postdocs) started in the mainstream or most promising lines of nonstring QG research.

It is a concentrated one week school. So we may be able to learn something both about QG and about how the ESF QG commission thinks about QG, by looking at the lineup.

The school is divided between the lecture series and the separate workshop talks:
In the lecture series, there are five speakers and each will give a sequence of five one-hour lectures.
We already got that part---the titles and abstract summaries of the five lecture series (by Ashtekar, Baez, Barrett, Rivasseau, Rovelli) were already posted early this summer.

The new information we have is the titles of some of the workshop talks.
I already mentioned that Steve Giddings is giving one of those 45-minute workshop talks. I just registered that Derek Wise is also giving a workshop talk.
Of course there are talks by Martin Reuter (AsymSafe) Jerzy Lewandowski (Loop) and Harald Grosse (Noncommutative). But it is interesting to see who you didn't expect and figuure why they were included in the school. These are supposed to be leads into promising lines of research, where progress is being made.

I'll get a link to the program as of today. (It still has some TBAs.)
http://www.physics.ntua.gr/corfu2009/Program/3rdWeekSchool.html

Maybe Harald Grosse is not as familiar to us as Reuter or Lewandowski, so here is his Uni Vienna page:
http://mathphys.univie.ac.at/index.php?id=1597

I will copy out the list of lecture series and seminar talks to see what we can make of them.

 

[marcus]

School lecturers

A. Ashtekar
Loop Quantum Gravity
J. Baez
Categorification in Fundamental Physics
J. Barrett
Spin networks and quantum gravity
V. Rivasseau
Renormalization in Fundamental Physics
C. Rovelli
Covariant loop quantum gravity and its low-energy limit

Workshop speakers

C-S Chu
Quantum Geometry of the M5-brane in a Constant C-Field from Multiple Membranes
R. Szabo
UV/IR duality in noncommutative quantum field theory
K. Giesel
TBA
J. Lukierski
TBA
S. Majid
TBA
H. Grosse
Noncommutative renormalizable Quantum Field Theory
M. Reuter
Asymptotic Safety and Background Independence in Quantum Gravity
P. Schupp
TBA
H. Steinacker
Matrix Models, Quantum Spaces, and Gravity
P. Aschieri
TBA
G. Barnich
Asymptotically flat spacetimes revisited
L. Castellani
Noncommutative supergravity
S. Giddings
TBA
J. Lewandowski
Spin-foams from the LQG point of view
C. Meusburger
Geometry and observables in (2+1)-gravity
F. Lizzi
TBA
J. Dolan
TBA
S. Watamura
Hopf algebra symmetry and Diffeomorphism in String
A. Baratin
2-group representations and spin foam models
W. Fairbairn
Asymptotics of four-dimensional spin foam models
A. Mikovic
Spin foam perturbation theory and quantum gravity
D. Wise
2-group representations and state-sum models
R. Littlejohn
On asymptotics of spin networks
J. van der Bij
Gravitational anomaly and fundamental forces

If anybody wants to review the descriptions of what each of the five lecture series are going to be about, here's the link:
http://www.physics.ntua.gr/corfu2009/qg.html
Rovelli's summary of what his series is going to be about is pretty intertesting.
It's also interesting that not only is Baez in the lecture series lineup (with n-categories) but both Derek Wise and Arist Baratin are giving related talks about 2-groups as they connect to spinfoam and other quantum gravity concepts. James Dolan is still TBA but his workshop talk is likely to also be related to the material Baez is developing. (The webpage said "B. Dolan" but that was probably a typo.)

 

[marcus]

More titles are available. Some changes have been made. Only 3 TBA are left. School starts Monday, day after tomorrow.

School lecturers

A. Ashtekar: Loop Quantum Gravity
J. Baez: Categorification in Fundamental Physics
J. Barrett: Spin networks and quantum gravity
V. Rivasseau: Renormalization in Fundamental Physics
C. Rovelli: Covariant loop quantum gravity and its low-energy limit

Workshop speakers

C-S Chu: Quantum Geometry of the M5-brane in a Constant C-Field from Multiple Membranes
R. Szabo: UV/IR duality in noncommutative quantum field theory
K. Giesel: Reduced phase space quantization of Loop Quantum Gravity
J. Lukierski: Kappa-deformed oscillators and kappa-statistics
S. Majid TBA
H. Grosse: Noncommutative renormalizable Quantum Field Theory
M. Reuter: Asymptotic Safety and Background Independence in Quantum Gravity
P. Schupp: Noncommutative black holes
H. Steinacker: Matrix Models, Quantum Spaces, and Gravity
P. Aschieri TBA
G. Barnich: Asymptotically flat spacetimes revisited
L. Castellani: Noncommutative supergravity
S. Giddings TBA
J. Lewandowski: Spin-foams from the LQG point of view
C. Meusburger: Geometry and observables in (2+1)-gravity
F. Lizzi: Gauge symmetry breaking in matrix models
B. Dolan: Equivariant Dimensional Reduction and Quiver Gauge Theory
S. Watamura: Hopf algebra symmetry and Diffeomorphism in String
A. Baratin: 2-group representations and spin foam models
W. Fairbairn: Asymptotics of four-dimensional spin foam models
A. Mikovic: Spin foam perturbation theory and quantum gravity
D. O'Connor: Emergent and Evaporating Geometry
R. Littlejohn: On asymptotics of spin networks
J. van der Bij: Gravitational anomaly and fundamental forces

http://www.physics.ntua.gr/corfu2009/Program/3rdWeekSchool.html
Seeing the title of his talk allows me to clear up my confusion about Brian Dolan (Perimeter, Maynooth). When the title was TBA I thought it might be a Baez co-author.