Drs. Shalini Ganguly and Anish Agashe from the SMCM Physics Department attended the American Physical Society Global Physics Summit 2026 in Denver, Colorado from March 14 -19. This is the largest physics conference in the world with over 10,000 researchers attending.
The talks ranged from advances in fundamental physics to new results in astrophysics and cosmology. A highlight was the latest update about the nature of dark energy from the DESI data. The current status of the research is telling that the data favors a dynamical dark energy over a cosmological constant type dark energy. As of now, this result stands at a statistical significance between 2.3σ and 3.3σ which means there is somewhere between 1 in 50 and 1 in 2000 chance that the result is a statistical fluke or a random error. At this level, this result is considered an evidence or a hint. More data and more analysis is needed to reach the standard of at least a 5σ result for this to count as a discovery.
Apart from this, Dr. Agashe presented his own research on how to recover the equations of general relativity from a well-defined variational principle when working with a non-Riemannian geometry.
