Current seminars







In addition to the Vienna relativity seminars, the calendars above sometimes contain other events of interest to members of the relativity group. The seminars of the Vienna relativity group are listed below.

Currently (unless indicated otherwise) all seminars take place on Wednesday at 14:15 in Seminarraum A, Währinger Strasse 17, 2nd Floor.

The Mathematical Physics Seminars take place on Tuesdays at 13.45.

The Particle Physics Seminars take place on Tuesdays at 16.15.


  • Wednesday, 12 March 2025, 14:15
    Speaker: Willi Kepplinger (University of Vienna): A panoramic view of low dimensional manifolds

The character and status of very simple sounding questions in manifold theory depends crucially on the dimension of the manifold. An illustrative example is the famous Jordan curve theorem which roughly speaking states that a topological embedding of S^1 into R^2 separates R^2 into a bounded component (which is homeomorphic to a disk) and an unbounded one. Naively speaking this theorem seems obvious, if annoying to prove. In reality, it is a miracle it is true in the first place as corresponding statements in dimension 3 and higher are simply wrong. In this talk I will try to give an overview over questions in low dimensional topology (such as existence and uniques of smooth structures, classification of manifolds) and how these depend on the dimension.

  • Tuesday, 1 April 2025, 13:00, Seminarraum A, Währinger Straße 17, 1090 Vienna, 2nd floor
    Speaker: Helmut Rumpf (University of Vienna): What is really tested in gravitationally mediated entanglement experiments?

TRecently it was proposed that GME experiments may probe linearized gravity only as a quantum controlled field and not as a quantum field theory. I will argue that the concept of a relativistic quantum controlled field is fundamentally flawed because of causality violation. Quantum control is also implicit in a recent path-integral description of those experiments, which casts doubt on its validity beyond the Newtonian approximation.