Mehdi Assanioussi, Christian Fleischhack, llkka Mäkinen, Hanno Sahlmann, Wolfgang Wieland
February 2025
12th Tux Winter Workshop on Quantum Gravity
Around 40 researchers from the field of quantum gravity from Europe, Asia and North America met for five days in Tux in the Austrian Alps, at the 12th Tux winter workshop on Quantum Gravity 10 to 14 February 2025. The goal of this workshop series is to report and discuss new results and ideas at the conference venue, but also during hikes, on the ski slopes, or over dinner in the restaurants of the little mountain resort.
In October 2024, Jerzy Lewandowski, founder and co-organizer of the workshop series had passed away and so this year's edition was held in his memory and had a special focus on his work and research interests. In both, invited and contributed talks, many references to Jerzy Lewandowski were made to his kind and generous personality and his fine humor as well as to his towering scientific achievements.
The invited speakers Abhay Ashtekar, Fernando Barbero, Bianca Dittrich, Kristina Giesel, Wojciech Kaminski, YonggeMa, Guillermo Mena Marugán, José Mourão, Daniele Oriti, Jorge Pullin, and Thomas Thiemann reflected on Lewandowski's work and his personal and scientific influence on them. They also presented their own recent work, some of which was directly related to earlier results by Jerzy Lewandowski.
Invited and contributed talks reported on progress in understanding a wide range of topcis, from classical and quantum black holes, apparent horizons, quantum cosmology, precanonical quantization, effective actions, entanglement in quantum field theory, asymptotic charges and covariant phase space, to higher gauge theory, among others. A public talk by Jorge Pullin on gravitational waves recounted, in a highly entertaining way, the circuitous history of the subject, from Newton's first ideas to their eventual detection and the 2017 Nobel prize in physics.
Over a workshop dinner, participants had had the chance of catching up and hatching plans for the future. For those participants that did not have to leave quickly after the end of the official program, the workshop ended with a dinner at mountain hut and a nightly snowy sled ride down to the village under the starry sky.
