Nuclear, Particle, Astroparticle and Cosmology (NUPAC) Seminars
Simulations of binary black holes and the self-force
Presented by Aaron Zimmerman, UT Austin
Modeling the inspiral and merger of two black holes, together with the gravitational waves they emit, amounts to solving the relativistic two-body problem. Many approaches exist to tackle this challenge, ranging from analytic approximations to large-scale numerical simulations. Each approach is viable in a limited region of parameter space, and where regions overlap techniques can be compared and refined, driving further progress. In this talk I will discuss numerical simulations of binary black holes, and compare them to a variety of predictions from the self-force approximation. This is a perturbative approach to the two-body problem when the binary has a large ratio of masses. Further development of this approximation is needed in order to predict the inspiral of stellar mass black holes into supermassive black holes, a key observational target for the future space-based gravitational wave detector LISA.
2:00 pm, Thursday, February 6, 2020
PAIS-3205, PAIS
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