Simon Fraser University
SFU Cosmology Seminars

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Friday, 16 March 2018, 14:30 in WMC3260

Prof. Frans Pretorius (Princeton University)

The dynamical, strong-field regime of General Relativity (physics colloquium)

LIGO has ushered in the era of gravitational wave astronomy, having observed several signals consistent with binary black hole mergers, and one attributable to a binary neutron star collision. The latter event also produced significant electromagnetic radiation, and was observed across the spectrum by a host of telescopes and satellites. In this talk I will discuss what these events can teach us about the fundamental nature of dynamical, strong-field gravity. So far, the data is consistent with Einstein's theory of general relativity, though the quantitative bounds are weak. In the coming years we can anticipate an ever growing population of merger events detected with ever more sensitive instruments, allowing high precision tests of strong-field gravity, ruling out alternative theories and "exotic" compact objects, or discovering novel physics beyond general relativity.

Seminars in 2017:

2017-10-04 13:30 in P8445B - Gwendolyn Eadie (University of Washington): The Milky Way meets hierarchical Bayes
2018-01-16 13:00 in P8445B - Vitaly Vanchurin (University of Minnesota Duluth): General Relativity from non-equilibrium thermodynamics of quantum information
2018-01-24 14:30 in P8445B - Yuri V. Gusev (Lebedev Research Center in Physics, Moscow): Thermal radiation of finite size emitters
2018-01-31 14:30 in P9449 - Gabor Kunstatter (University of Winnipeg): Gradient Flow of Holographic Superconductors
2018-03-01 13:30 in P8445B - Tanmay Vachaspati (Arizona State): Search for intergalactic magnetic fields and implications
2018-03-09 14:30 in WMC3260 - Ken Clark (Queen's University): Dark matter: How to hunt for the unknown (CAP Lecture)
2018-03-15 13:30 in P8445B - Hideki Maeda (Hokkai-Gakuen University): Exact black hole formation from a conformally coupled scalar field in three dimensions
2018-03-16 14:30 in WMC3260 - Frans Pretorius (Princeton University): The dynamical, strong-field regime of General Relativity (physics colloquium)
2018-03-29 13:30 in P8445B - Michael Desrochers (UBC): Topological vacuum energy
2018-08-16 13:30 in P8445B - Shinji Mukohyama (Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics): Minimalism in modified gravity

[ See complete seminar archives | iCal feed ]

Modified by Andrei Frolov <frolov@sfu.ca> on 2023-11-01