This award supports the participation of a mixture of experienced and young US researchers in a US-Latin American workshop on quantum gravity co-organized by the Jorge Pullin of Louisiana State University and the Latin American Quantum Gravity Network. It will take place in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on July 28-31, 2010. The workshop will be held in conjunction with the Fifth Quantum Gravity in the Southern Cone workshop in Buenos Aires, and a preceding school on quantum gravity will take place in La Plata, Argentina, the week before. Thus, U.S. attendees will be able to participate in those events as well. This meeting will allow graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and faculty to interact and to share information about current research on the application of the rules of quantum mechanics, which describe the microscopic world, to the gravitational field. The personal interactions are expected to stimulate relationships and collaborative research activities that will enhance the careers of the participants. Among the objectives of study in this field is to understand what happened shortly after the Big Bang process that created the universe and what takes place inside black holes. The award is co-funded by the Physics Division in the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences and the Office of International Science and Engineering.
This grant supported the participation of 11 US researchers of different stages in their careers to attend a workshop in Buenos Aires, Argentina with the Latin American Quantum Gravity network. The workshop allowed the researchers to exchange and learn new ideas and to forge new collaborative ties. It also helped enhance the level of research in Latin America and to indirectly help them transition into a more knowledge-based economy through the development of human capital. For many of the US researchers it was their first visit to South America and for many of the young participants from South America it was the first time to hear US researchers. The meeting was preceded by a week long school on quantum gravity in the nearby city of La Plata which was convened taking advantage of the presence in Argentina of the US researchers and other speakers. The Latin American Quantum Gravity network is an informal alliance between the quantum gravity groups of the "Southern Cone" of South America, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay. The group has organized regular meetings every three years starting in 1996 and in several of them there have been NSF supported workshops for US researchers to interact with members of the network. This has led to further visits of researchers to and from the US and also spearheaded several research collaborations that resulted in high quality publications in the international peer reviewed literature. The meeting took place in the National Library of Argentina named after the famous writer Jorge Luis Borges.
