Gravitational Waves

The spectacular discovery of gravitational waves by the LIGO/Virgo collaboration has opened a new experimental window to study astronomy and test Einstein’s theory of gravity and reinvigorated the interest in scattering processes of blackholes in gravitational theories. Recently, the centre has driven major innovations in this growing area of research by utilising state of the art amplitudes methods such as unitary and the double copy. Researchers of the Centre for Fundamental Physics are engaged in developing novel, extremely efficient methods to capture the detailed dynamics of blackholes and neutron stars including spin and tidal effects which are important for gravitational wave physics. An intriguing aspect of this work is that it takes cutting-edge methods that were designed to compute quantum effects in high energy particle scattering relevant for collider physics and applies them successfully to classical scattering of massive bodies in gravity.

In parallel, researchers use gravitational waves as probes for modifications of Einstein’s theory of gravity using effective field theories (EFT) of gravity and dark energy (DE). Improved data from gravitational wave experiments will allow to constrain the parameter space of such EFT models or even exclude certain scenarios.

Artist’s impression of two inspiralling black holes. (Image credit: LIGO/T. Pyle)