Blaumann Prize
The Blaumann Prize is awarded to outstanding early-career researchers for significant contributions to fundamental questions in quantum gravity and related areas. Recent awards have recognized work addressing some of the most challenging problems in physics, including the quantum nature of spacetime and gravity beyond classical descriptions.
2025 Blaumann Prize for
Ali Akil and Qianhang Ding
Congratulations to our friends Ali Akil and Qianhang Ding, both working at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in China, for the 2025 Blaumann Prize. The prize recognizes their work “A dark matter probe in accreting pulsar-black hole binaries,” published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
The article presents a brilliant idea for using the accretion rate of black holes in binaries, which can in principle be derived from the variation of their period, as a tool for estimating properties of dark matter. Given the possible relevance of dark matter for LQG, this is of direct interest for our community. The Blaumann foundation, which has financed this year's Les Houches LQG school, supports the kind of basic research on foundational topics dear to our community.