Toni Font is a Full Professor at the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics (DAA) of the University of Valencia. He also has a second affiliation at the Astronomical Observatory of the same university. Prior to these appointments he conducted post-doctoral research at the Albert Einstein Institute in Potsdam (Germany) and at the Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics in Garching (Germany).
Abstract:
Computational physics in strong gravity: a tool for gravitational-wave astronomy.
The observation of gravitational waves (GW) by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) detector network has opened an entirely new window to study the universe. So far, the LVK Collaboration has published three GW Transient Catalogs corresponding to the first three observational campaigns. Those catalogs comprise 90 events exceeding the threshold to be considered of astrophysical origin, all of them associated with coalescing compact binaries, either comprising two black holes, two neutron stars, or even the mixed compact binary system. Computational physics has been an important aid to those detections and to conduct physical inferences of the collected data. The accurate modelling of such extreme systems is fairly challenging, requiring inputs from a variety of fields. Those include, among others, Einstein’s gravity to describe the space-time dynamics, hydrodynamics and MHD to account for matter fields at relativistic speeds, nuclear physics for the equation of state of matter at supranuclear densities, or the transport of radiation fields. This talk will provide an overview of computational physics in strong gravity, using compact binary coalescences as the prime example of physical systems driving progress in the field.
