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Gravitational Universe: Challenges and Opportunities

Project description

Gravitational wave data analysis algorithms could lead to a wealth of new discoveries

The landmark detection of gravitational waves emitted by merging black-hole and neutron-star binaries heralded a new era in physics. It offers the opportunity to challenge current understanding of dark matter and dark energy and test whether general relativity holds in the strong field regime. However, new data-analysis algorithms need to be developed to extract meaningful results from the wealth of data provided by next-generation detector experiments. In addition, the newly developed theoretical models of gravitational wave sources should not rely on standard theories for probing fundamental physics. The EU-funded GRU project aims to forge scientific collaborations in the field through secondments to institutions in Canada, Japan and the United States. The project will also organise international conferences and workshops to disseminate knowledge.

Objective

Gravitational Universe: Challenges and Opportunities

The landmark detection of gravitational waves (GWs) emitted by merging black-hole and neutron-star binaries has opened a new era in physics, giving us access to the strong-field regime of the gravitational interaction. The wealth of data coming from current and future GW detectors (such as 3G, LISA, PTA) will provide an opportunity to challenge current paradigms, exploring fundamental physics from an entirely new perspective, and eventually finding new physics. In this new observational window, we could learn that general relativity is not adequate to describe the strong-field regime of gravity; new fundamental fields beyond the standard model, or new kinds of compact objects, could challenge current understanding of dark matter and dark energy.

In order to reach these results, the impressive experimental effort put in place will not be sufficient if not accompanied by a similar effort by the theoretical and the data-analysis communities. Severe theoretical and conceptual problems need to be overcame before the new generation of detectors is operating. On one hand, we need to develop new data-analysis algorithms, to extract meaningful results from the impressive amount of data which will be delivered. On the other hand, we need to develop theoretical models of GW sources which do not assume the standard theories and paradigms which we want to test, in order to perform non-biased tests and to use observational results to address fundamental problems. It is of utmost importance that scientists with different expertise and addressing different challenges exchange their views and learn from each other’s problems. The proposed studies can be loosely classified into four groups with considerable overlap: i) Perturbation techniques in general relativity and beyond ii) Non-linear simulations of binary compact objects beyond general relativity iii) GWs from the dark universe iv) Data analysis for GW experiments

Coordinator

UNIVERSITA DI PISA
Net EU contribution
€ 18 400,00
Address
LUNGARNO PACINOTTI 43/44
56126 Pisa
Italy

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Region
Centro (IT) Toscana Pisa
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
€ 18 400,00

Participants (4)

Partners (4)