Current trimester: Flavors of Amplitudes
Theoretical Physics
Gravitational waveforms from differential equations
byCarlo Heissenberg
Abstract:The direct detection of gravitational waves has put the relativistic two-body problem in the spotlight and stimulated progress in perturbative approaches that provide analytic insight into its dynamics. Two strategies that have been witnessing interesting developments to this end are the ones based on scattering amplitudes, which apply to binary scatterings at large impact parameter, and on black-hole perturbation theory, which applies to extreme-mass-ratio binaries. In this talk, I will discuss how two very different kinds of differential equations have been playing a key role in such recent developments, in particular with the goal of characterizing the gravitational waves emitted and (re)absorbed by these systems.