Description

Gravitational Wave Astronomy provides a revolutionary new view of the universe that can probe previously unexplorable regions, including the interiors of neutron stars, collisions of black holes, which emit energy at luminosities exceeding the entire visible universe, and even remnants of the big bang. To gain new insight into the dynamics of the universe, gravitational wave astronomers need to be able to infer the nature of the sources from the observed signals. The physical parameters of these sources can be extracted from the observed signals if the dependence of the waveform on source parameters is known to sufficiently high-accuracy. This project aims at modeling merging black-hole binaries using numerical simulations of the fully nonlinear Einstein equations on supercomputers. This project will keep RIT group at the forefront of black holes Supercomputer simulations, contributing to the development of students and postdoctoral fellows careers in STEM disciplines.

This award principal goals are to produce waveforms for LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA (LVK) source parametrization efforts, and to model the remnant mass, spin, and gravitational recoil from highly-precessing spinning eccentric binary black holes in order to elucidate the distributions of these quantities and how they affect the distribution and growth of black holes. This work will produce and publicly release gravitational waveforms in previously not sampled regions of parameter space for LVK data analysis, to directly use these waveforms for studies and modeling of binary black holes dynamics, and will improve the accuracy and efficiency of the numerical simulations.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.