CANCELLED: Colloquium within National Seminar Theoretical High Energy Physics
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Europe/Amsterdam
Z011 (Nikhef)
Z011
Nikhef
Description
The gravitational waves from inspiraling binary systems encode detailed information about the nature and internal structure of the compact objects. These signatures arise from spin and tidal effects including the tidal excitation of the objects' characteristic quasi-normal modes, as I will explain. A particularly interesting application is to the case of neutron stars, where tremendous gravity compresses matter to up to several times nuclear density. This makes neutron stars unique laboratories for strongly interacting matter in the ground state at the highest physically possible densities, far from the realms accessible with collider experiments and first-principles theoretical calculations. Matter under such extreme conditions likely exhibits a variety of emergent phenomena and novel phases not encountered anywhere else in the universe. Characterizing these properties with gravitational waves will help us gain a deeper understanding of strong interactions, their unusual features, and how the structure of visible matter assembles from its constituents. I will describe how this characterization can be accomplished by illustrating the method for the dominant effects. It requires computing the connection to gravitational wave signatures using a tapestry of approximation schemes for the interplay of dynamical gravity and matter, and constructing efficient models needed for data analysis. I will summarize what we have learned from recent measurements and conclude with an outlook onto the remaining challenges and exciting prospects for the next years as gravitational-wave science continues to move towards an era of precision physics.
