Category Archives: Author Insights

Author Insights are short informal articles written by authors of high quality CQG papers for the broad community served by the journal.

CQG+ Insight: Chiral Gravity

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by Kirill Krasnov

Kirill Krasnov

Kirill Krasnov, Professor of Mathematical Physics, University of Nottingham. Pictured here visiting Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire

We seem to live in four space-time dimensions, and so should take the structures available in this number of dimensions seriously. One of these is chirality, see below for clarifications on my usage of this term. Related to chirality, there is a remarkable phenomenon occurring in General Relativity (GR) in four space-time dimensions. This phenomenon is so stunning that I would like to refer to it as the chiral miracle. It is well-known to experts. Still, even after almost 40 years after it had appeared in the literature, it has not become part of the background of all GR practitioners. I would like to use this CQG+ insight format to try to rectify this.

I start by reviewing the notion of chirality in four space-time dimensions. I then describe the “chiral miracle” that allows for chiral description(s) of gravity in Continue reading →

A Study of Time Delay from Different Time Zones

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Netta Engelhardt (University of California, Santa Barbara) and Sebastian Fischetti (Imperial College) gave us an insight into their communication methods whilst collaborating for their research paper recently published in CQG.

Snetta

On a dark London evening and a sunny California day — January 19, 2016, to be precise — Netta sent Sebastian a Skype message:

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So began a new project for this dynamic duo, published recently in CQG. Unlike our previous project, this one presented a new challenge (with which researchers are all too familiar): we were separated by an eight-hour time difference. Thus began a three-way collaboration: Netta, Sebastian, and Skype (with the third member being the least cooperative).

The process began Continue reading →

Inspiral into Gargantua; where science meets science-fiction

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Niels Warburton from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shares an insight into his latest work with Sam Gralla and Scott Hughes published in Classical and Quantum Gravity.

Niels Warburton

Niels Warburton is a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow currently working at the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He works on calculating gravitational waveforms from the capture of compact objects by black holes ranging from hundreds to millions of solar masses. Outside of research he often encounters other types of waves on the waters around Boston where he is a keen sailor. Niels co-authored the article recently published in CQG with Sam Gralla of the University of Arizona and Scott Hughes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The first merging black holes recently detected by LIGO were strange objects indeed. Torturing reality so that even light cannot escape from their interiors, as they whirled around each other at over half the speed of light, the disturbances they induced in space and time propagated outwards as gravitational waves. The measured characteristic chirp, an upsweep in frequency and amplitude of the waves, signaled that the two black holes had merged into a single, larger black hole. Amazingly, though this remnant was more than sixty times as massive as our sun it could be described by just two numbers – its mass and its spin. This is an unusual property for any macroscopic object as they usually require Continue reading →

Crashing Neutron Stars on the Italian Dolomites

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Bruno Giacomazzo, Andrea Endrizzi, Riccardo Ciolfi, Wolfgang Kastaun share details of their latest research published in the CQG focus issue: Rattle and shine: the signals from compact binary mergers.

Bruno Giacomazzo, Andrea Endrizzi, Riccardo Ciolfi, Wolfgang Kastaun

From left to right: Bruno Giacomazzo, Andrea Endrizzi, Riccardo Ciolfi, Wolfgang Kastaun.
About the authors: Bruno Giacomazzo is an assistant professor at the Department of Physics of the University of Trento and the Principal Investigator of the numerical relativity group there. The group is currently composed of two postdocs (Riccardo Ciolfi and Wolfgang Kastaun) and two PhD students (Andrea Endrizzi and Takumu Kawamura).

At the end of 2013, after seven years spent abroad (between Germany and the USA),  Bruno Giacomazzo came back to Italy for an assistant professor position at the University of Trento in Northern Italy. He used to come to this region when he was a kid to hike or ski on the mountains, but he never thought he would have come back here to study neutron star mergers.

Thanks to financial support from MIUR (Ministry of Education, University, and Research) he was able to attract Riccardo Ciolfi and Wolfgang Kastaun from abroad and to create with them the first numerical relativity group in this part of Italy. Thanks to Continue reading →

Coating thermal noise research for LIGO-India

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Maya Kinley-Hanlon — an undergraduate student in the Department of Physics at the American University in Washington, DC — tells us more about her group’s work on optical coatings for LIGO-India.

Maya Kinley-Hanlon is a PhD candidate in the Department of Physics at the American University in Washington, DC.

Maya Kinley-Hanlon is an undergraduate student in the Department of Physics at the American University in Washington, DC.

Our CQG paper describes measurements of optical coatings on silica glass substrates to determine if storing the LIGO optics for many years before installing them in India will cause any problems.  The coatings are known to be fairly robust in their optical properties, but as is always the case with LIGO optics, no one has any real idea about the thermal noise properties.  Since thermal noise from the coatings is expected to be a limiting noise source in the LIGO detectors, knowing if storing the optics could cause a problem is an important issue.  I worked on this Continue reading →

Waves, stability and exotic black holes

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Jake Dunn and Dr Claude Warnick from the Pure Mathematics group at Imperial College, London tell us all about their research using the Klein-Gordon equation to study black holes.

Jake Dunn

Jake Dunn is a PhD student at Imperial College, London.
Claude Warnick is a Lecturer in Pure Mathematics at Imperial College, London.

There is a long standing conjecture in the theory of general relativity that the final state of the gravitational collapse of a star should be a stationary black hole modelled by the Kerr solution. To this date there remains no mathematical proof of this statement, and it seems that we may have to wait a while before this result can be established. Even the simpler problem of black hole stability is a considerable mathematical challenge.

We may think of a stationary black hole as Continue reading →

What does numerical relativity have to do with detecting gravitational waves?

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Heather Fong — a PhD candidate in Physics at the University of Toronto, who also loves travelling and gastronomy photography — gives us an insight into her group’s work on using numerical relativity simulations for the detection of gravitational waves.

heatherfong

Heather Fong, a PhD candidate in Physics at the University of Toronto.

Answer: quite a lot! Numerical relativity (NR) provides the most accurate solutions to the binary black hole problem, which is exactly the type of source LIGO wants to detect — and has succeeded at! Most of the time, LIGO’s data streams are overwhelmed with noise, and so we use a technique called matched-filtering to identify gravitational-wave signals. Finding and characterizing signals requires a massive amount of accurate waveforms, and we use semi-analytic waveform models as filters which are built using the results of NR simulations.

Why don’t we use NR alone to identify signals? It certainly would be ideal if the theoretical template waveforms were generated entirely from NR; not only would we be using the most accurate waveforms available, it would also allow us to Continue reading →

Fractals and black hole shadows

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Jake Shipley and Dr Sam Dolan work in the Particle Astrophysics and Gravitation group at the University of Sheffield, focusing on general relativity, wave propagation and black hole physics. Here they provide us with an insight into their research. 

Jake Shipley

Jake Shipley is a Ph.D student in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Sheffield. If Jake were a black hole, you would also see a lensed version of Dr Sam Dolan, standing behind the camera.

This has been a “miracle year” for relativity.

LIGO detected gravitational waves. The LISA Pathfinder mission demonstrated near-perfect freefall in space. And the era of gravitational-wave astronomy began in some style.

A century after black holes and gravitational waves were first predicted, we have learnt something truly mind-boggling: When two black holes collide, they shake the fabric of space-time with more power than is radiated by all the stars in the known universe put together!

The “chirps” from distant black hole collisions will travel for millions of years, at the speed of light, to reach our growing network of gravitational-wave detectors on Earth … and one day, out in space.

Next year, attention will turn to the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT): a global network of radio telescopes linked together to form an Earth-sized virtual telescope, using the technique of Very Long Baseline Interferometry. The EHT will Continue reading →

Why is our universe about to decay?

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Dr Kin-ya Oda (left, Osaka university) and Dr Masatoshi Yamada (right, Kyoto university).

Dr Kin-ya Oda (left, Osaka university) and Dr Masatoshi Yamada (right, Kyoto university).

It has been revealed that we are living on the edge of vacuum instability by the discovery of Higgs particle at the Large Hadron Collider since 2012. The determination of Higgs mass finally provides the last-missed parameter, the Higgs self coupling, to be 0.12 in the Standard Model of particle physics after nearly half century of its foundation. This value completes the initial conditions for a set of differential equations, called renormalization group (RG) equations, which govern how particles interact at very high energy scales. It turns out that the self coupling can vanish or even become negative at the Planck scale, where the quantum gravity effects become significant. We note for later reference that the Yukawa coupling between the Higgs and top quark plays a crucial role to reduce the Higgs self coupling in its RG evolution. The Higgs potential is about to become Continue reading →

Evolution of the Universe Through Soft Singularities

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Vasilis Oikonomu

Dr Vasilis K. Oikonomou is a researcher in Tomsk State Pedagogical University and in the Laboratory for Theoretical Cosmology in Tomsk State University of Control Systems and Radioelectronics (TUSUR) in Tomsk Russia. His research interests are focused on inflationary and bouncing cosmology, modified gravity, supersymmetric quantum systems, mathematical physics and epistemic game theory.

Describing the correct Universe evolution is one of the challenges in modern theoretical cosmology. The vital features of a correct Universe evolution are the successful description of early and late-time acceleration and also the intermediate eras, the radiation and matter domination eras. With our recently published CQG paper entitled ‘’ Singular F(R) cosmology unifying early and late-time acceleration with matter and radiation domination era’’, the author and Prof. Sergei Odintsov provided an F(R) gravity description of all the evolution eras in an unified way.

The primordial curvature perturbations are so relevant today for current observations since these capture the information about the primordial Universe at the time inflation took place. During the Continue reading →