Alessandra Buonanno | |
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Born | 1968 |
Nationality | Italian American |
Alma mater | University of Pisa |
Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Fields | Gravitational waves |
Institutions | |
Website | www |
Alessandra Buonanno (born 1968) [1] is an Italian-American theoretical physicist and director at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) [2] in Potsdam. She is the head of the "Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity" department. [3] She holds a research professorship [4] at the University of Maryland, College Park, and honorary professorships at the Humboldt University in Berlin, [5] and the University of Potsdam. [6] She is a leading member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, [7] which observed gravitational waves from a binary black-hole merger in 2015. [8]
Buonanno earned her MSc in 1993, and she completed her PhD in theoretical physics at the University of Pisa in 1996. [9] After a brief period spent at the theory division of CERN, she held a postdoctoral position at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES) in France and the R.C. Tolman Prize Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. [10]
Buonanno became a permanent researcher (Chargée de 1ere classe, CR1) in 2001 at the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris (IAP) and then at the Astroparticle and Cosmology Laboratory (APC) in Paris with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) before joining the University of Maryland as a physics professor in 2005. [4] She moved to the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in 2014. [11]
Buonanno was a Kavli Fellow at the Kavli Frontiers of Science Japanese-American Symposium of the National Academy of Sciences in 2007. [12] She was the William and Flora Hewlett Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, from 2011 to 2012. [13] She was a Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute from 2014 to 2020. [14]
Buonanno's work with Thibault Damour of reducing the two-body problem in general relativity to an effective one-body formalism, [15] [16] and her research at the intersection of analytical-relativity modeling [17] [18] [19] and numerical relativity simulations were employed to observe gravitational waves from merging binary black holes for the first time, and infer their astrophysical and cosmological properties. [8] [20] [21] Beyond her core expertise in modeling gravitational waves from compact-object binary systems, Buonanno, in collaboration with Yanbei Chen, computed the quantum-optical noise in the advanced-LIGO gravitational-wave detectors, [22] [23] and showed that quantum correlations between photon shot noise and radiation-pressure noise (i.e., the optical-spring effect) can circumvent constraints imposed by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in those detectors.[ citation needed ]
In theories of quantum gravity, the graviton is the hypothetical quantum of gravity, an elementary particle that mediates the force of gravitational interaction. There is no complete quantum field theory of gravitons due to an outstanding mathematical problem with renormalization in general relativity. In string theory, believed by some to be a consistent theory of quantum gravity, the graviton is a massless state of a fundamental string.
The following is a timeline of gravitational physics and general relativity.
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is a large-scale physics experiment and observatory designed to detect cosmic gravitational waves and to develop gravitational-wave observations as an astronomical tool. Two large observatories were built in the United States with the aim of detecting gravitational waves by laser interferometry. These observatories use mirrors spaced four kilometers apart to measure changes in length—over an effective span of 1120 km—of less than one ten-thousandth the charge diameter of a proton.
Rainer "Rai" Weiss is a German-born American physicist, known for his contributions in gravitational physics and astrophysics. He is a professor of physics emeritus at MIT and an adjunct professor at LSU. He is best known for inventing the laser interferometric technique which is the basic operation of LIGO. He was Chair of the COBE Science Working Group.
Einstein@Home is a volunteer computing project that searches for signals from spinning neutron stars in data from gravitational-wave detectors, from large radio telescopes, and from a gamma-ray telescope. Neutron stars are detected by their pulsed radio and gamma-ray emission as radio and/or gamma-ray pulsars. They also might be observable as continuous gravitational wave sources if they are rapidly spinning and non-axisymmetrically deformed. The project was officially launched on 19 February 2005 as part of the American Physical Society's contribution to the World Year of Physics 2005 event.
The Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics is a Max Planck Institute whose research is aimed at investigating Einstein's theory of relativity and beyond: Mathematics, quantum gravity, astrophysical relativity, and gravitational-wave astronomy. The institute was founded in 1995 and is located in the Potsdam Science Park in Golm, Potsdam and in Hannover where it closely collaborates with the Leibniz University Hannover. Both the Potsdam and the Hannover parts of the institute are organized in three research departments and host a number of independent research groups.
Bruce Allen is an American physicist and director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hannover Germany and leader of the Einstein@Home project for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. He is also a physics professor at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and the initiator / project leader of smartmontools hard disk utility.
GEO600 is a gravitational wave detector located near Sarstedt, a town 20 kilometres (12 mi) to the south of Hanover, Germany. It is designed and operated by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and the Leibniz Universität Hannover, along with University of Glasgow, University of Birmingham and Cardiff University in the United Kingdom, and is funded by the Max Planck Society and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).
Gravitational-wave astronomy is a subfield of astronomy concerned with the detection and study of gravitational waves emitted by astrophysical sources.
The LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) is a scientific collaboration of international physics institutes and research groups dedicated to the search for gravitational waves.
Bernard F. Schutz FInstP FLSW is an American and naturalised British physicist. He is well known for his research in Einstein's theory of general relativity, especially for his contributions to the detection of gravitational waves, and for his textbooks. Schutz is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He is a professor of physics and astronomy at Cardiff University, and was a founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany, where he led the Astrophysical Relativity division from 1995 to 2014. Schutz was a founder and principal investigator of the GEO gravitational wave collaboration, which became part of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC). Schutz was also one of the initiators of the proposal for the space-borne gravitational wave detector LISA, and he coordinated the European planning for its data analysis until the mission was adopted by ESA in 2016. Schutz conceived and in 1998 began publishing from the AEI the online open access (OA) review journal Living Reviews in Relativity, which for many years has been the highest-impact OA journal in the world, as measured by Clarivate.
Thibault Damour is a French physicist.
A binary black hole (BBH), or black hole binary, is a system consisting of two black holes in close orbit around each other. Like black holes themselves, binary black holes are often divided into binary stellar black holes, formed either as remnants of high-mass binary star systems or by dynamic processes and mutual capture; and binary supermassive black holes, believed to be a result of galactic mergers.
The first direct observation of gravitational waves was made on 14 September 2015 and was announced by the LIGO and Virgo collaborations on 11 February 2016. Previously, gravitational waves had been inferred only indirectly, via their effect on the timing of pulsars in binary star systems. The waveform, detected by both LIGO observatories, matched the predictions of general relativity for a gravitational wave emanating from the inward spiral and merger of a pair of black holes of around 36 and 29 solar masses and the subsequent "ringdown" of the single resulting black hole. The signal was named GW150914. It was also the first observation of a binary black hole merger, demonstrating both the existence of binary stellar-mass black hole systems and the fact that such mergers could occur within the current age of the universe.
PyCBC is an open source software package primarily written in the Python programming language which is designed for use in gravitational-wave astronomy and gravitational-wave data analysis. PyCBC contains modules for signal processing, FFT, matched filtering, gravitational waveform generation, among other tasks common in gravitational-wave data analysis.
The effective one-body or EOB approach is an analytical approach to the gravitational two-body problem in general relativity. It was introduced by Alessandra Buonanno and Thibault Damour in 1999. It aims to describe all different phases of the two-body dynamics in a single analytical method.
GW 190412 was a gravitational wave (GW) signal observed by the LIGO and Virgo detectors on 12 April 2019. In April 2020, it was announced as the first time a collision of a pair of very differently sized black holes has been detected. As a result of this asymmetry, the signal included two measurable harmonics with frequencies approximately a factor 1.5 apart.
Gravitational memory effects, also known as gravitational-wave memory effects are predicted persistent changes in the relative position of pairs of masses in space due to the passing of a gravitational wave. Detection of gravitational memory effects has been suggested as a way of validating general relativity.
C. S. Unnikrishnan is an Indian physicist and professor known for his contributions in multiple areas of experimental and theoretical physics. He has been a professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Mumbai and is currently a professor in the School of Quantum Technology at the Defence Institute of Advanced Technology in Pune. He has made significant contributions in foundational issues in gravity and quantum physics and has published over 250 research papers and articles. Unnikrishnan is also a key member of the LIGO-India project and a member of the global LIGO Scientific Collaboration
Ground-based interferometric gravitational-wave search refers to the use of extremely large interferometers built on the ground to passively detect gravitational wave events from throughout the cosmos. Most recorded gravitational wave observations have been made using this technique; the first detection, revealing the merger of two black holes, was made in 2015 by the LIGO sites.