Strong Gravity
This series consists of talks in areas where gravity is the main driver behind interesting or peculiar phenomena, from astrophysics to gravity in higher dimensions.
Seminar Series Events/Videos
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Thursday Oct 08, 2020Speaker(s):
The astrophysical background of gravitational waves (AGWB) is composed by the incoherent superposition of gravitational wave signals emitted by resolved and unresolved astrophysical sources from the onset of stellar activity until today. In this talk, I will present a theoretical framework to characterize the AGWB in terms of energy density and polarization and I will show predictions for the angular power spectra of the background anisotropy and for its cross-correlations with electromagnetic observables, in the frequency bands accessible by LIGO/Virgo and LISA. I will then discuss t
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Thursday Oct 01, 2020Speaker(s):
Gravitational waves from the coalescence of compact binaries provide a unique opportunity to test gravity in strong field regime. In particular, the postmerger phase of the gravitational signal is a proxy for the nature of the remnant.
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Thursday Sep 24, 2020Speaker(s):
The statement that general relativity is deterministic finds its mathematical formulation in the celebrated ‘Strong Cosmic Censorship Conjecture’ due to Roger Penrose. I will present my recent results on this conjecture in the case of negative cosmological constant and in the context of black holes. It turns out that this is intimately tied to Diophantine properties of a suitable ratio of mass and angular momentum of the black hole.
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Thursday Sep 17, 2020Speaker(s):
Quasars are the most luminous objects in the universe powered by accretion onto supermassive black holes (SMBHs). They can be observed at the earliest cosmic epochs, providing unique insights into the early phases of black hole, structure, and galaxy formation. Observations of these quasars demonstrate that they host SMBHs at their center, already less than ~1 Gyr after the Big Bang.
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Thursday Sep 10, 2020Speaker(s):
Most massive stars spend their lives in so close orbit with a companion star that severe mass exchange or even coalescence is inevitable as the stars evolve and swell. A third of massive stars are thus stripped of their fluffy, hydrogen-rich envelopes, leaving the compact helium core exposed. These stripped stars are so hot that most of their radiation is emitted in the ionizing regime.
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Thursday Jun 25, 2020
The study of compact objects in the strong field regime needs a thorough understanding of the initial value problem in general relativity at the resence of hydrodynamical or magnetohydrodynamical sources. This is a twofold problem that includes general relativistic solutions that represent realistic astrophysical systems at a given moment in time as well as their subsequent evolutions.
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Thursday Jun 18, 2020Speaker(s):
The velocity of a gravitational wave (GW) source provides crucial information about its formation and evolution processes.
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Thursday May 28, 2020Speaker(s):
Compact white dwarf (WD) binaries are important sources for space-based gravitational-wave (GW) observatories, and an increasing number of them are being identified by surveys like ELM and ZTF. We study the effects of nonlinear dynamical tides in such binaries. We focus on the global three-mode parametric instability and show that it has a much lower threshold energy than the local wave-breaking condition studied previously. By integrating networks of coupled modes, we calculate the tidal dissipation rate as a function of orbital period.
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Thursday May 14, 2020Speaker(s):
To predict the gravitational waves emitted by a black hole binary, one needs to understand the dynamics of the binary in general relativity. No closed form solutions of this problem exist. Instead one must introduce some form of approximation. One such approximation, can be made if one of the components is much heavier than the other, suggesting a perturbative expansion in the mass-ratio. I will review this small mass-ratio (SMR) expansion of the dynamics, and the progress that has been made over the last two decades.
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Thursday Apr 30, 2020Speaker(s):
We comment on the recently introduced Gauss-Bonnet gravity in four dimensions. We argue that it does not make sense to consider this theory to be defined by a set of D->4 solutions of the higher-dimensional Gauss-Bonnet gravity. We show that a well-defined D->4 limit of Gauss-Bonnet Gravity is obtained generalizing a method employed by Mann and Ross to obtain a limit of the Einstein gravity in D=2 dimensions. This is a scalar-tensor theory of the Horndeski type obtained by dimensional reduction methods.
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