8th Barcelona Initiative for Gravitation (BIG) Meeting

Friday Feb 13, 2026, 9:00 AM → 5:30 PM Europe/Madrid

Seminar room (IFAE)

Diego BLAS (IFAE, ICREA), Fabrizio ROMPINEVE (UAB & IFAE), Oriol PUJOLAS (IFAE)

10:00 AM → 10:30 AM Reception

10:30 AM → 11:30 AM TBA

Speaker: Nanda REA (ICE-CSIC UAB Barcelona)

11:30 AM → 12:00 PM Coffee

12:00 PM → 1:00 PM TBA

Speaker: Ennio SALVIONI (UAB & IFAE)

1:00 PM → 2:30 PM Lunch

2:30 PM → 3:30 PM Tracing the Origin of the Nanohertz Gravitational Wave Background

By tracking the radio pulses from an array of millisecond pulsars, several pulsar timing array collaborations have found evidence for a stochastic background of gravitational waves permeating our Galaxy. In this talk, I will briefly review how this evidence was obtained, then discuss ongoing efforts to identify the origin of the signal and explore its implications for cosmology and astrophysics. I will focus in particular on the challenges of mapping the sky distribution of the gravitational-wave power and on searches for non-Gaussian features in the background.

Speaker: Andrea MITRIDATE (Imperial College, London)

3:30 PM → 4:00 PM Coffee

4:00 PM → 5:00 PM Temperature-Dependent CPT Violation: Constraints from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis

In this talk, I will explore temperature-dependent CPT violation during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) modeled as an electron–positron mass asymmetry controlled by a finite-temperature background. Using a modified version of the BBN code PRyMordial with dynamically-solved chemical potentials and appropriate finite-mass corrections, my collaborator and I have constrained electron-positron mass differences using the observed abundances of Helium-4, Deuterium, and Neff. We find no region of parameter space consistent with all three observables at 1σ, though pairwise combinations yield allowed bands that tightly bound the mass asymmetry. I will present three toy models demonstrating how the type of CPT violation can arise from field-theoretic mechanisms, including temperature-driven phase transitions. The results that I will discuss provide the most stringent constraints on early-universe CPT violation in this regime, probing parameter space inaccessible to laboratory experiments.

Speaker: Anne-Katherine BURNS (Barcelona U)