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September 16, 2024 – September 20, 2024 past

PUG Seminar

Whitmore 321 (IGC Lounge)

PUG Seminar

When a Kerr black hole is perturbed, it undergoes damped oscillations described by quasi-normal modes (QNMs) with decay times and complex frequencies completely determined by the black hole's mass and spin. QNMs can be used to describe the gravitational-wave signal produced by the remnant of a binary black hole merger. This will be an introductory talk about QNMs and the tests of general relativity that can be performed by observing this "ringdown" phase, including key results from GW150914.

Program

Date Time Speaker Title
2024-09-20 14:00 Viviana Cáceres Barbosa As the black hole rings: Quasi-normal modes of black holes
About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.