Waveforms for Extreme Mass Ratio Inspirals

Description du projet

De nouvelles approches de modélisation des formes d’onde pourraient révéler de nouveaux types de signaux d’ondes gravitationnelles

La science des ondes gravitationnelles entre dans une nouvelle ère passionnante avec le lancement prochain de Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). Contrairement aux détecteurs actuels, LISA explorera une nouvelle bande de fréquences pour faciliter la détection de sources telles que les spirales à rapport de masse extrême (EMRI), les binaires de trous noirs supermassifs et les objets exotiques. Des modèles de forme d’onde précis sont essentiels pour analyser ces signaux, car ils permettent d’extraire et d’interpréter les données à partir d’observations bruitées. Bien que l’approche de la force propre gravitationnelle (GSF) soit la seule façon viable de modéliser des systèmes hautement asymétriques comme les EMRI, il n’existe actuellement aucun modèle efficace ou précis. Le projet EMRIWaveforms, financé par le CER, contribuera à la création des premiers modèles GSF complets. Les recherches proposées pourraient ouvrir la voie à des découvertes révolutionnaires dans le domaine des ondes gravitationnelles et de l’étude des phénomènes cosmiques extrêmes.

Objectif

The breakthrough detection of Gravitational Waves (GWs) by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration (LVK) is generating waves of excitement within the physics community. The detection itself led to the award of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics. Even more exciting is that the first detection was only the start. LVK continues to make groundbreaking discoveries as the detector is tuned to be sensitive to ever more distant sources.
The next quantum leap in GW science will come with the launch of the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), recently adopted as a flagship European Space Agency L-class mission with support from NASA. Just as X-ray, gamma-ray and radio observations of the electromagnetic universe unveiled a host of sources which were previously undetectable by optical telescopes, the sensitivity of LISA to an entirely new GW frequency band will open the field up to a whole new realm of sources such as Extreme Mass-Ratio Inspirals (EMRIs), supermassive binaries, and exotic objects such as cosmic strings.
LVK demonstrated that a hybrid approach is essential for GW science: experimentalists built the detector, while theoreticians produced models for the expected waveforms from GW sources. These waveforms form a crucial part of the data analysis pipeline; a matched-filtering approach is used to extract signals from noisy GW observations, and this process fundamentally relies on access to accurate waveform models. Without the models, many GW signals would go entirely undetected, and even those that are detected would be poorly understood.
Many of the GW signals LISA will observe are qualitatively very different from those of LVK sources and will require fresh approaches to waveform modelling. Gravitational Self-Force (GSF) has long been established as the only viable approach for modelling highly asymmetric black hole binaries such as EMRIs, but no comprehensive, efficient and accurate GSF models yet exist. This project will, for the first time, build those models.