Black holes and gravitational waves

• Grant number: 23/00295-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: May 01, 2023
• End date: February 28, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Physics - Elementary Particle Physics and Fields
• Principal Investigator: Riccardo Sturani
• Grantee: Gabriel Macedo Dantas
• Host Institution: Instituto de Física Teórica (IFT). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de São Paulo. São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 22/06350-2 - Fundamental physics and LIGO, AP.ESP

Abstract

The recent detections of gravitational waves by the interferometersLIGO and Virgo not only enabled the beginning of a new science,gravitational wave astronomy, but also spurred theoretical investigation to deepen the understanding of two-body gravitational dynamics.In particular, applying the powerful tools of effective field theoryto classical gravitational scattering has been useful in deepening theanalytic knowledge of two-body dynamics, which helped improving theconstruction of gravitational waveforms used to analyze gravitationalwave data.Note that even assuming that the underlying gravitational theoryis perfectly known, i.e. General Relativity, formidable difficultiesremains in computing physical effects making the bridge with experiments,when perturbative techniques are applied which quickly becomeintractable at moderately high perturbative order.For this reason it is interesting to study how generic properties of fieldtheory, like unitarity, causality, and symmetry assumptions,can lead tobounds that can be translated into as constraints on Wilson coefficients of the low energy effective action.In particular we propose to study the apparently puzzling property of blackholes which seems to violate the fluctuation dissipation theoremby having absorptive properties but not admitting tidal deformations.This project nicely fits into the temático 2022/06350-2, which relies on twomain pillars: theoretical development of field theory methodsapplied to the general relativistic two-body problem and cosmologicalapplications of gravitational wave detections.