After decades of worldwide efforts, the detection of gravitational waves (GW) from the coalescence of binary black holes (BBH) is becoming routine, ushering the so-called era of gravitational wave astronomy. The GW from a BBH merger carries information about the dynamics of space-time and the two-body interaction in general relativity and about the nature of the individual stars and about the final remnant object. In this talk, I will review the main aspects of the physics of the merger of BBH and outline some of the information can be inferred from the observation of GW, with a particular focus towards the fundamental physics that can and is being learnt by observations of Virgo and LIGO.
Short bio: Prof. Walter del Pozzo got his PhD in astronomy from Birmingham University, UK, in 2010. He moved then to Nikhef in Amsterdam, where he joined the Virgo Collaboration. He worked on tests of general relativity with gravitational waves. He was appointed chair of the LIGO-Virgo strong-field group in 2011 and held the position until 2017. In 2013 he moved back to Birmingham for a post-doc where he focused on the discovery of gravitational waves and supervised the paper “Tests of general relativity with GW150914”. Together with the rest of the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration, he was aware the Special Breakthrough Prize in theoretical physics and the Gruber Cosmology Prize. In 2016 he won a Rita Levi Montalcini fellowship and moved to Pisa, IT, with a tenure since 2019. Currently he is the chair of the review committee for the Virgo Collaboration.
Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82166748581?pwd=endqamN4Mks0cWRnR1k1UHpLcFZSdz09
Meeting ID: 821 6674 8581 (060922)