The Gravitational Lens

In the comments section of Orange Quark, and a number of other physics blogs, I frequently see questions about the latest interesting paper that has popped up on the physics archive. Virtual spaces where one can discuss such papers are not well developed, but some do exist; for example, the CosmoCoffee forum. It seems to me that, with the increasing number of papers appearing daily, there's a market for sites with their own selection criteria, which winnow the number to a manageable one. Of course, one also wants the option to skim all the abstracts from four archives daily, as I do now.

As of yesterday there is a new contribution in this field. The Gravitational Lens is a short newsletter highlighting recent work in gravitational physics (all gravitational physics, not just waves) that is of broad interest. It will be posted every two months, and you can be notified of new issues by subscribing to the email distribution list.

The Editor-in-Chief of The Gravitational Lens is the talented Michelle Larson, who is the Deputy Director of the Center for Gravitational Wave Physics at Penn. State University. As a member of the editorial board, my role in this is to inform Michelle about any recent preprints (say, from astro-ph or gr-qc) that are related to gravitational physics, and lend themselves to highlighting, in a manner accessible to students and researchers in all areas of physics.

If you're interested in gravitational physics, I encourage you to visit The Gravitational Lens every couple of months and take a gander at what's new. If you see new papers on the archive that fascinate you, feel free to drop me a comment or email - perhaps they'll end up being discussed there.