Past Event: Oden Institute Seminar

Binary Black Hole Simulations: How to Make Gravitational Waves

Pablo Laguna, Professor and Chair, Department of Physics, UT Austin

Abstract

**This seminar will be presented LIVE in POB 6.304.  It will also be streamed live via Zoom.**

I will present an overview of the process involved in numerical relativity simulations of binary black holes collisions and how to extract gravitational wave information to assist with the detection and interpretation of observations by LIGO.

Biography

Laguna is a computational astrophysicist, investigating astrophysical phenomena involving binary systems with black holes and/or neutron stars. These systems provide the ultimate expression of Einstein's theory of General Relativity. Laguna's computational studies are contributing to a new astronomy based on gravitational wave observations.

Laguna received his bachelor’s degree in physics in 1981 from the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitan at Iztapalapa in Mexico City, and his doctoral degree in physics in 1987 from the University of Texas at Austin. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Relativity in the University of Texas at Austin from 1987 to 1989, and a visiting assistant professor at Drexel University from 1989 to 1990. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1990 to 1992. In 1992, he joined the faculty of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State as an assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor in 1998 and to professor in 2000. He was named associate director of both the Center for Gravitational Wave Physics and the Institute for Gravitational Physics and Geometry in 2001. In 2008, he became professor in the Schools of Physics and of Computational Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He was founding member and first director of the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics at Georgia Tech until 2013 when he became chair of the School of Physics. In 2020, he joined the faculty of the Department of Physics and the University of Texas at Austin as well as member of the Center for Gravitational Physics. In 2021, he was appointed chair of the Department of Physics. Laguna was named fellow of the American Physical Society in 2008 and elected to the Mexican Academy of Science in 2007. He received in 2016 the Edward A. Bouchet award from the American Physical Society “for contributions to numerical relativity; in particular, on the simulation of colliding black holes.”