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Astrophysics, Gravitation and Cosmology Seminar - Pablo Cano (KU Leuven) "Black Holes Beyond General Relativity and their Gravitational-Wave Signatures"

Speaker: Pablo Cano
Date: 10/26/2022
Time: 12 p.m.
Location: Loomis 464
Event Contact: Brandy Koebbe
bkoebbe@illinois.edu
Sponsor: Department of Physics
Event Type: Seminar/Symposium
 

Gravitational waves from black hole binaries bring us a unique window into extreme gravity that will allow us to perform high-precision tests of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity (GR). However, in this talk I will address a more ambitious question: could we observe signs of modified gravity using gravitational waves? I will focus on the case of higher-derivative corrections to Einstein’s theory, which are well-motivated theories from the viewpoints of effective and fundamental theory. I will first introduce a general family of higher-derivative extensions of GR and I will show how the Kerr metric, which represents a rotating black hole in GR, is modified by these corrections. Then I will discuss recent efforts towards understanding the observational signatures of these modified Kerr black holes.