Alessandra Buonanno

Last updated

Alessandra Buonanno
Portrat Alessandra Buonanno.jpg
Buonanno in 2016
Born1968
Nationality Italian
American
Alma mater University of Pisa
Awards
Scientific career
Fields Gravitational waves
Institutions
Website www.aei.mpg.de/alessandra-buonanno

Alessandra Buonanno (born 1968)[ citation needed ] is an Italian-American theoretical physicist and director at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) [1] in Potsdam. She is the head of the "Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity" department. [2] She holds a research professorship [3] at the University of Maryland, College Park, and honorary professorships at the Humboldt University in Berlin, [4] and the University of Potsdam. [5] She is a leading member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, [6] which observed gravitational waves from a binary black-hole merger in 2015. [7]

Contents

Early life and education

Buonanno earned her MSc in 1993, and she completed her PhD in theoretical physics at the University of Pisa in 1996. [8] 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. [9]

Career and research

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. [3] She moved to the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in 2014. [10]

Buonanno was a Kavli Fellow at the Kavli Frontiers of Science Japanese-American Symposium of the National Academy of Sciences in 2007. [11] She was the William and Flora Hewlett Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, from 2011 to 2012. [12] She was a Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute from 2014 to 2020. [13]

Buonanno's work with Thibault Damour of reducing the two-body problem in general relativity to an effective one-body formalism, [14] [15] and her research at the intersection of analytical-relativity modeling [16] [17] [18] 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. [7] [19] [20] 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, [21] [22] 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 ]

Awards and honors

Awards as member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration

See also

Related Research Articles

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General relativity, also known as the general theory of relativity and Einstein's theory of gravity, is the geometric theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1915 and is the current description of gravitation in modern physics. General relativity generalises special relativity and refines Newton's law of universal gravitation, providing a unified description of gravity as a geometric property of space and time or four-dimensional spacetime. In particular, the curvature of spacetime is directly related to the energy and momentum of whatever matter and radiation are present. The relation is specified by the Einstein field equations, a system of second order partial differential equations.

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The following is a timeline of gravitational physics and general relativity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LIGO</span> Gravitational wave detector

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 which are capable of detecting a change of less than one ten-thousandth the charge diameter of a proton.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rainer Weiss</span> Nobel Prize-winning American physicist

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Einstein@Home</span> BOINC volunteer computing project that analyzes data from LIGO to detect gravitational waves

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.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics</span>

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GEO600</span> Gravitational wave detector in Germany

GEO600 is a gravitational wave detector located near Sarstedt, a town 20 km 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). GEO600 is capable of detecting gravitational waves in the frequency range 50 Hz to 1.5 kHz, and is part of a worldwide network of gravitational wave detectors. This instrument, and its sister interferometric detectors, when operational, are some of the most sensitive gravitational wave detectors ever designed. They are designed to detect relative changes in distance of the order of 10−21, about the size of a single atom compared to the distance from the Sun to the Earth. Construction on the project began in 1995.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Virgo interferometer</span> Gravitational wave detector in Santo Stefano a Macerata, Tuscany, Italy

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gravitational-wave astronomy</span> Branch of astronomy using gravitational waves

Gravitational-wave astronomy is an emerging field of science, concerning the observations of gravitational waves to collect relatively unique data and make inferences about objects such as neutron stars and black holes, events such as supernovae, and processes including those of the early universe shortly after the Big Bang.

The LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) is a scientific collaboration of international physics institutes and research groups dedicated to the search for gravitational waves.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thibault Damour</span> French physicist

Thibault Damour is a French physicist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Binary black hole</span> System consisting of two black holes in close orbit around each other

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 stellar binary 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">First observation of gravitational waves</span> 2015 direct detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO and VIRGO interferometers

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Effective one-body formalism</span> Approach to the two-body problem in general relativity

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References

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