Department Colloquium | Black Hole Collider Physics

Zoom link: https://umich.zoom.us/j/94692610056

From the flying cannonball of Newton to the free-falling elevator of Einstein, thought experiments have traditionally played an important role in our understanding of gravitational physics. In this talk, I will describe how imagining the scattering of black holes and gravitons can shed light on the two-body problem in General Relativity. I will explain how using modern ideas from collider and particle physics, such as quantum field theory and surprising relations between gluons and gravitons, as well as basic principles, such as unitarity (probabilities add up to one), we can calculate and constrain the outcome of such scattering experiments. From such calculations we can produce state-of-art Post-Minkowskian results for LIGO and learn new lessons, which will become more and more relevant as we enter the era of 21st century precision gravitational physics.