ICRANet

ICRA and ICRANet

In 1985, ICRA (International Center for Relativistic Astrophysics) was founded by Remo Ruffini (University of Rome "La Sapienza") together with Riccardo Giacconi (Nobel Prize for Physics 2002), Abdus Salam (Nobel Prize for Physics 1979), Paul Boynton (University of Washington), George Coyne (former director of the Vatican observatory), Francis Everitt (Stanford University), Fang Li-Zhi (University of Science and Technology of China).

The Establishment and the Statute of ICRANet were signed on March 19, 2003 and recognized in the same year by the Republic of Armenia and the Vatican State. ICRANet has been created in 2005 by a law of the Italian Government, ratified by the Italian Parliament and signed by the President of the Italian Republic Carlo Azeglio Ciampi on February 10, 2005. The Republic of Armenia, Italy, the Vatican State, ICRA, the University of Arizona and the Stanford University are the founding members.

On September 12, 2005 the Steering Committee was established and had its first meeting. Remo Ruffini and Fang Li-Zhi were appointed respectively Director and Chairman of the Steering Committee. On December 19, 2006 the Scientific Committee was established and had its first meeting in Washington DC. Riccardo Giacconi was appointed Chairman and John Mester Co-Chairman.

On September 21, 2005 the Director of ICRANet signed with the Ambassador of Brazil Dante Coelho De Lima the adhesion of the Federative Republic of Brazil to ICRANet. The entrance of Brazil, requested by the President of Brazil Luiz Ignácio Lula Da Silva has been unanimously ratified by the Brazilian Parliament. On August 12, 2011 the President of Brazil Dilma Rousseff signed the entrance of Brazil in ICRANet.

Marcel Grossmann meetings

By the beginning of the twentieth century the new branch of mathematics, tensor calculus, was developed in the works of Gregorio Ricci Curbastro and Tullio Levi Civita of the University of Padua and the University of Rome "La Sapienza". Marcel Grossmann of the University of Zurich who had a deep knowledge of the Italian school of geometry and who was close to Einstein introduced to him these concepts. The collaboration between Einstein and Grossmann was essential for the development of General Relativity.

Remo Ruffini and Abdus Salam in 1975 established the Marcel Grossmann meetings (MG) on Recent Developments in Theoretical and Experimental General Relativity, Gravitation, and Relativistic Field Theories, which take place every three years in different countries gathering near 1000 researchers. MG1 and MG2 were held in 1975 and in 1979 in Trieste; MG3 in 1982 in Shanghai; MG4 in 1985 in Rome; MG5 in 1988 in Perth; MG6 in 1991 in Kyoto; MG7 in 1994 at Stanford; MG8 in 1997 in Jerusalem; MG9 in 2000 in Rome; MG10 in 2003 in Rio de Janeiro; MG11 in 2006 in Berlin; MG12 in 2009 in Paris; MG13 in 2012 in Stockholm; MG14 in 2015 in Rome. Since its foundation ICRANet plays a leading role in organization of MG meetings.

Celebration of the International Year of Astronomy 2009

ICRANet has been Organisational Associate of the International Year of Astronomy 2009 and supported the global coordination of IYA2009 financially. In this occasion ICRANet organized a series of international meetings under the general title "The Sun, the Star, the Universe and General Relativity" including: the 1st Zeldovich meeting (Minsk, Belarus), the Sobral Meeting (Fortaleza, Brazil), the 1st Galileo - Xu Guangqi meeting (Shanghai, China), the 11th Italian-Korean Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics (Seoul, South Korea), the 5th Australasian Conference - Christchurch Meeting (Christchurch, New Zealand).

Celebration of the International Year of Light 2015

2015 is declared by the initiative of the United Nations and UNESCO as the International Year of Light, and it is the centenary of the formulation of the equations of general relativity by Albert Einstein, and the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of relativistic astrophysics. ICRANet is a Bronze Associate sponsor of the International Year of Light.

In 2015, ICRANet also organized a series of international meetings including: the Second ICRANet César Lattes Meeting (Niterói – Rio de Janeiro – João Pessoa – Recife – Fortaleza, Brazil), International Conference on Gravitation and Cosmology / the 4th Galileo-Xu Guangqi meeting (Beijing, China), Fourteenth Marcel Grossmann Meeting - MG14 (Rome, Italy), the 1st ICRANet Julio Garavito Meeting on Relativistic Astrophysics (Bucaramanga – Bogotá, Colombia), the 1st Sandoval Vallarta Caribbean Meeting on Relativistic Astrophysics (Mexico City, Mexico).

Organization and its structure

ICRANet is an international organization promoting research activities in relativistic astrophysics and related areas.

The organization consists of the Director, the Steering Committee and the Scientific Committee. The members of committees are representatives of the countries and member institutions. ICRANet has a number of permanent Faculty positions. Their activities are supported by administrative staff and secretariat personnel. ICRANet financing is based by Statute on the funds provided by the governments and by voluntary contributions, donations.

Director of ICRANet is Remo Ruffini.

In 2015 the Steering Committee consists of:

The current Chairperson (2015) of the Steering Committee is Francis Everitt.

The first Chairperson of the Scientific Committee was Riccardo Giacconi, recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize for physics, who ended his term in 2013 for reasons of age. The actual (2015) Chairperson of the Scientific Committee is Felix Aharonian.

The Scientific Committee in 2015 consists of: Prof. Felix Aharonian (Armenia), Dr. Carlo Luciano Bianco (ICRA), Prof. Massimo Della Valle (Italy), Prof. John Mester (Stanford University), Prof. David Arnett (University of Arizona), Dr. Gabriele Gionti (Vatican City State).

The Faculty in 2015 consists of Professors Vladimir Belinski, Carlo Luciano Bianco, Jorge Rueda, Remo Ruffini, Gregory Vereshchagin, and She-Sheng Xue, and is supported by an Adjunct Faculty made up of more than 30 internationally renowned scientists participating in ICRANet activities, and between eighty "Lecturers" and "Visiting Professors". Among these are the Nobel Laureates Riccardo Giacconi, Murray Gell-Mann, Theodor Hänsch, Gerard ’t Hooft and Steven Weinberg.

Member states and institutions

Currently ICRANet members are four countries and three Universities and research centers.

Member states:

Member institutions:

ICRANet have signed collaboration agreements with over 30 institutions, universities and research centers in different countries.

ICRANet seats and centers

The network consists of seats and center. Seat agreements, establishing rights and privileges, including extraterritoriality, have been signed for the Seat in Pescara in Italy, for the Seat in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and for the Seat in Yerevan in Armenia. The Seat Agreement for the Seat in Pescara has been ratified on May 13, 2010. The Seat agreement for the Seat in Yerevan has been approved unanimously by the Parliament of the Republic of Armenia on November 13, 2015.

High speed optical fiber connection with different locations are made possible by the connection to the pan-European data network for the research and education community (GÉANT) through the GARR network.

Currently ICRANet centers are operative at:

ICRANet Centers in Pescara, Rome and Nice

ICRANet headquarters is located in Pescara, Italy. This ICRANet center is devoted to coordination of ICRANet activities. Yearly meetings of Scientific and Steering committees are usually held there. International meetings such as Italian-Korean Symposia on Relativistic Astrophysics are regularly held in this Center. Scientific activities in Pescara center include the fundamental research on the early cosmology by the Russian school guided by Vladimir Belinski.

Activities of the ICRANet Seat at Villa Ratti in Nice comprise the coordination of the IRAP-PhD program, as well as scientific activities connected with the ultra high energy observations by the University of Savoy and the VLT observations performed by the Côte d’Azur Observatory, which involve the thesis works of IRAP PhD students. The University of Savoy is the closest French lab to the CERN.

ICRANet Center in Armenia

The ICRANet Center in Yerevan has been established at the Presidium of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia (NAS RA) since January 2014. It is located at Marshall Baghramian Avenue, 24a. Scientific activities in this center are coordinated by Prof. Felix Aharonian and Dr. Narek Sahakyan. In Armenia, the ICRANet center collaborates with other scientific institutions from the Academy and Universities, which includes organizing joint international meetings/workshops, summer schools for PhD students and mobility programs for scientists in the field of Astrophysics. ICRANet center in Armenia coordinates ICRANet activities in the area of Central-Asian and Middle-Eastern countries.

In 2014, the Government of the Republic of Armenia approved the agreement to establish the ICRANet international center in Armenia. The seat agreement has been signed in Rome on February 14, 2015 by the director of ICRANet, Remo Ruffini and the ambassador of Armenia in Italy, Mr. Sargis Ghazaryan. On November 13, 2015 the Parliament of the Republic of Armenia unanimously the Seat Agreement.

A summer school and international scientific conference dedicated to the issues of Relativistic Astrophysics entitled "1st Scientific ICRANet Meeting in Armenia: Black Holes: the largest energy sources in the Universe" were held in Armenia from June 28 to July 4, 2014.

ICRANet Center in Brazil

The Seat of ICRANet in Rio de Janeiro has been activated, at first in the premises granted by CBPF; with the possible expansion to the Cassino da Urca. A school of Cosmology and Astrophysics is being developed jointly with Brazilian institutions. The 2nd ICRANet César Lattes Meeting dedicated to relativistic astrophysics was held in Rio de Janeiro in 2015.

Currently (2015) ICRANet has signed agreements of scientific collaboration with 15 Brazilian universities, institutions and research centers.

There are two specific programs initiated by ICRANet, which are underway (2015):

ICRANet Centers in USA

The present Chairman of the ICRANet Steering Committee Francis Everitt is responsible for the ICRANet Center at the Leland Stanford Junior University. His special activity has been the conception, development, launch and data acquisition, all the way to the elaboration of the final data analysis, of the NASA Gravity Probe B mission, one of the most complex physics experiment in space ever performed.

The first Chairman of the ICRANet Steering Committee Fang Li-Zhi developed collaboration with the Physics Department of the University of Arizona in Tucson. The collaboration with its Astronomy Department is promoted by David Arnett.

ICRANet and IRAP PhD program

Since 2005 ICRANet co-organizes an International Ph.D. program in Relativistic Astrophysics — International Relativistic Astrophysics Ph.D. Program, IRAP-PhD, the first joint PhD astrophysics program.

Scientific research at ICRANet

ICRANet aims are training/education and research in the field of relativistic astrophysics.

The main activities of ICRANet are addressed to promote the international scientific co-operation; for this purpose many projects of scientific research in the domain of relativistic astrophysics, cosmology, theoretical physics and mathematical physics are being carried out.

The main areas of scientific research in ICRANet are:

Between 2006 and early 2015, ICRANet has produced over 1800 scientific publications in refereed journals such as Physical Review, the Astrophysical Journal, Astronomy and Astrophysics etc., in its various lines of research.

New scientific concepts and terms introduced by ICRANet scientists:

Black hole (Ruffini, Wheeler 1971)

Ergosphere (Rees, Ruffini, Wheeler, 1974)

Pursue and plunge (Rees, Ruffini, Wheeler, 1974)

Black hole mass formula (Christodoulou, Ruffini, 1971)

Reversible and irreversible transformations of black holes (Christodoulou, Ruffini, 1971)

Dyadosphere (Damour, Ruffini, 1975; Preparata, Ruffini, Xue, 1998)

Dyadotorus (Cherubini et al., 2009)

Induced Gravitational Collapse (Rueda, Ruffini, 2012)

Binary-driven Hypernova (Ruffini et al., 2014)

Cosmic matrix (Ruffini et al., 2015)

International meetings

The Italian-Korean Symposia on Relativistic Astrophysics is a series of biannual meetings organized alternatively in Italy and in Korea since 1987. The symposia cover topics in astrophysics and cosmology, such as gamma ray bursts and compact stars, high energy cosmic rays, dark energy and dark matter, general relativity, black holes, and new physics related to cosmology.

The Galileo-Xu Guangqi meetings have been created in the name of Galileo and Xu Guangqi, the collaborator of Matteo Ricci (Ri Ma Dou), generally recognized for bringing to China the works of Euclid and Galileo and for his strong commitment to the process of modernization and scientific development of China. The 1st Galileo - Xu Guangqi Meeting was held in Shanghai, China in 2009. The 2nd Galileo - Xu Guangqi meeting took place in Hanbury Botanic Gardens (Ventimiglia, Italy) and Villa Ratti (Nice, France) in 2010. The 3rd and 4th Galileo - Xu Guangqi meetings were held in Beijing, China in 2011 and 2015, respectively.

These workshops represent a one-week dialogues on Relativistic Field Theories in Curved Space, which is inspired to the work of E. C. G. Stueckelberg and is named the Stueckelberg Workshops. These meetings included invited lectures by Abhay Ashtekar, Thomas Thiemann, Gerard 't Hooft and Hagen Kleinert.

ICRANet also organized:

PhD schools

Within IRAP PhD program ICRANet is organizing PhD schools, in particular 15 schools were held in Nice and Les Houches, France, within EMJD program.

ICRANet visiting program

ICRANet has developed a program of visits for scientific collaboration with short and long duration.

Prominent personalities have carried out their activities at ICRA and ICRANet, among them are: Francis Everitt, Chairman of the Scientific Committee of ICRANet, Isaak Khalatnikov, Russian physicist and former director of the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics from 1965 to 1992; Roy Kerr, New Zealand mathematician and discoverer of the "Kerr Metric"; Thibault Damour; Demetrios Christodoulou; Hagen Kleinert; Neta and John Bachall; Tsvi Piran; Charles Misner; Robert Williams; José Gabriel Funes; Fang Li-Zhi; Rashid Sunyaev.

Weekly seminars

ICRANet co-organizes a Joint Astrophysics Seminar at the Department of Physics of University "La Sapienza" and ICRA in Rome. All institutions collaborating with ICRANet as well as ICRANet centers are participating in these seminars in the regime of video conference.

Brazilian Science Data Center

The main objective of the Brazilian Science Data Center (BSDC) is to provide data of all international space missions existing on the wavelength of X- and gamma rays, and later on the whole electromagnetic spectrum, for all the galactic and extragalactic sources of the Universe. A special attention will be paid to the achievement and the complete respect of the levels defined by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA). In addition to these specific objectives, BSDC will promote technical seminars, annual workshops and it will assure a plan of scientific divulgation and popularization of science with the aim of the understanding of the Universe.

The BSDC is currently being implemented at CBPF, and at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), and will be expanded to all other ICRANet centers in Brazil as well as to the other Latin-American ICRANet Centers in Argentina, Colombia and Mexico: a unique coordinated continental research network planned for Latin America.