Preface

Abstract

The 14th conference in the series "Recent Developments in Gravity" was organized by the Theoretical Physics group of the Department of Physics, University of Ioannina, Greece. NEB-XIV (NEB-14) took place in Ioannina, Greece, from 8–11 June, 2010 at the Grand Serai Hotel.The abstracts of all the talks, along with other details of the meeting, are to be found on the website of the conference http://neb14.physics.uoi.gr/index.htm.The NEB series (initials from the Greek: Νεώτερες Εξελίξεις στην Βαρύτητα) is a series of meetings initiated in 1984 in Crete by the late Professor Vassilis Xanthopoulos and a group of Greek relativists. Since then this meeting has been held every other year at various cities in Greece, organized by different groups of Greek relativists and cosmologists. This was the third time it was organized at Ioannina (the other two times were in 1988 and 2000).It was our pleasure to see that the international participation in these meetings has been rising constantly during the last few years and NEB-14 continued this tradition. The Conference was attended by a total of 106 participants, with 62 of them from Institutions outside of Greece. We had 20 plenary session invited speakers (15 of whom were of international origin), 42 parallel session talks and 2 posters.The topics that are traditionally covered by the NEB conference series are: Cosmology (Dark Energy, Dark Matter, CMB etc) Gravitational Waves Alternative Theories of Gravity Relativistic Astrophysics Mathematical Relativity Quantum Gravity During the present conference, the following variety of topics were addressed through the participants' talks and posters: mainstream and alternative models of dark energy and dark matter, construction and testing of new cosmological models, alternative (either 4-dimensional or higher-dimensional) theories of gravity and their predictions, the interplay of gravity with gauge theories, properties of astrophysical and miniature black holes and other massive astrophysical objects, cosmological perturbation spectra, modeling of astrophysical and cosmological observables via alternative theories, attempts to build a consistent quantum gravity theory. We chose to place the emphasis in this meeting on subjects related to Observational and Theoretical Cosmology due to the rapid recent development of these research areas.Our goal was to provide a stimulating environment for the presentation and discussion of the most recent cutting-edge research results in cosmology and classical and quantum gravity. We believe that this goal was achieved and we hope that the next meeting that will take place at Chania (Crete) in 2012 (NEB-15) will further raise the standards of this series.Special thanks are due to the invited and keynote speakers for providing exciting talks and to all the participants for presenting interesting contributions and initiating fruitful discussions. We would also like to thank the Organizing Committee and the Scientific Committee for their valuable contributions to the organization of the meeting.Finally we would like to thank our main sponsors – the University of Ioannina, the Academy of Athens, the National Bank of Greece and the 'Prokos' Bookstore – for providing financial support and making this meeting possible. Last but not least, we are grateful to the European Research and Training Network "UniverseNet" (MRTN-CT-2006035863-1) for providing the funds for the publication of the proceedings of our meeting.The Editors Leandros Perivolaropoulos Panagiota Kanti The Organizing Committee: L Perivolaropoulos (Ioannina) (Chair) P Kanti (Ioannina) (Co-Chair) C Kolasis (Ioannina) N Stergioulas (Thessaloniki) K Kokkotas (Thessaloniki, Tuebingen) D Papadopoulos (Thessaloniki) M Plionis (Athens) S Basilakos (Athens) E Vagenas (Athens) S Nesseris (Niels Bohr) N Pappas (Ioannina) The Scientific Committee: A Ashtekar (Penn-State) N Batakis (Ioannina) D Christodoulou (ETH) G Contopoulos (Academy of Athens) C Frenk (University of Durham) V Frolov (Alberta) The Plenary Invited Speakers: Prof. J A Font (University of Valencia) Prof. V Frolov (University of Alberta) Prof. R Gregory (University of Durham) Prof. O Lahav (UCL London) Prof. D Psaltis (University of Arizona ) Prof. S Sarkar (University of Oxford) Prof. J Sola (Barcelona University) Prof. R Woodard (University of Florida) Keynote speakers: Prof. I Bakas (University of Patras) Prof. K Dimopoulos (University of Lancaster) Prof. D Giannios (Princeton University) Prof. N Mavromatos (Kings College, London) Prof. D Polarski (University Montpellier II) Prof. M Sakellariadou (Kings College, London) Prof. T Sotiriou (University of Cambridge) Prof. N Tetradis (University of Athens) Prof. C Tsagas (University of Thessaloniki)