Simon Fraser University
SFU Cosmology Seminars

For seminars and other local announcements, please subscribe to sfu-cosmo mailing list.

Thursday, 23 February 2012, 14:00 in P8445B

Prof. Jonathan Thornburg (Indiana University)

Modelling extreme mass ratio binary black hole inspirals for eLISA

Consider a stellar-mass black hole (mass ∼ 10 solar masses) in a close orbit around a supermassive black hole (mass ∼ 106 solar masses). In this talk I'll discuss the challenge of trying to model the orbital dynamics and gravitational-wave (GW) emission of such an "EMRI" system as it evolves under the influence of the gravitational radiation-reaction "self-force". Because of the highly asymmetric mass ratio the orbital-decay timescale is much longer than the orbital period, so a direct "numerical relativity" solution of the Einstein equations would be both impractically expensive and insufficiently accurate. Instead, we can use methods based on black hole perturbation theory, treating the small black hole as a perturbation of a background (Schwarzschild or Kerr) spacetime. I'll outline some of the analytical and computational challenges of these analyses, describe recent progress in surmounting these challenges, and discuss EMRI systems as potential GW sources for the proposed eLISA/NGO space-based GW observatory.

Seminars in 2011:

2011-09-15 14:00 in P8445B - Tanmay Vachaspati (Arizona State University): Primordial magnetic fields from the electroweak epoch
2011-10-18 14:00 in P8445B - Yin-Zhe Ma (UBC): Cosmology on large and small cosmic scales
2011-10-21 15:30 in AQ3149 - Andrei Frolov (SFU): Staring at the sky (physics colloquium)
2011-10-25 14:00 in P8445B - Ali Narimani (UBC): Dimensionless cosmology
2011-11-01 14:00 in P8445B - Andrei Frolov (SFU): Critical collapse and solitons in classical conformal field theory
2011-11-15 14:00 in P8445B - Archisman Ghosh (University of Kentucky): Cosmological singularities and AdS/CFT
2011-11-22 14:00 in P8445B - Jun-Qi Guo (SFU): Scalar wave propagation in Schwarzschild metric in some usual coordinates
2011-11-25 14:30 in AQ3149 - Levon Pogosian (SFU): Lambda, w and beyond (physics colloquium)
2011-11-29 14:00 in P8445B - Daniel Thomas (Imperial College): Making gravity count: Cluster numbers and other cosmological observables in model independent modified gravity
2012-01-17 14:00 in P8445B - Levon Pogosian (SFU): Fables of reconstruction: controlling bias in the dark energy equation of state
2012-02-07 14:00 in P8445B - Scott Dodelson (Fermilab): Gravitational lensing
2012-02-23 14:00 in P8445B - Jonathan Thornburg (Indiana University): Modelling extreme mass ratio binary black hole inspirals for eLISA
2012-03-08 14:00 in P8445B - Jarah Evslin (IHEP, Beijing): Galaxy-sized monopoles as dark matter?

[ See complete seminar archives | iCal feed ]

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