Gravity and astrophysics at UMiss

The University of Mississippi invites applications for a postdoctoral
position in the area of Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics. The
applicant must have a Ph.D. in Physics or Astrophysics and a good
track record in one or more of the following research areas:
gravitational-wave source modeling and astrophysics, numerical
relativity, post-Newtonian theory, alternative theories of gravity,
perturbation theory of stars and black holes.

The Gravitational and High-Energy Theory Group at the University of
Mississippi is active in various areas of theoretical and experimental
gravity, and is part of the LIGO collaboration. Members of the group
include Emanuele Berti, Luca Bombelli, Marco Cavaglia, Alakabha Datta
and Tibor Torma, adjunct professors Vitor Cardoso and Ulrich Sperhake,
three postdocs and several graduate students.

The successful applicant is expected to engage in a collaborative
research program involving several institutions, including Caltech and
Princeton in the USA, Lisbon, Cambridge, Rome and Aveiro in Europe,
and Para’ University in Brazil (among others).

A curriculum vitae (including a list of publications and a statement
of research interests) should be sent to the following e-mail address:

grpostdoc@phy.olemiss.edu

Please use the subject “Gravitational theory postdoc”. Applicants must
also arrange to have at least three recommendation letters to be sent
to the same email address.

Applications must be submitted as soon as possible, and no later than
12/31/2013. Late applications may be considered until the position is
filled.

UMiss is happy to welcome Dr. Shivaraj Kandhasami as new postdoc in the LIGO group. Shivaraj comes to us from the University of Minnesota, where he has recently obtained a doctorate in physics with a thesis on LIGO’s search for stochastic gravitational waves. Dr. Kandhasamy will reside at the Livingston LIGO Lab to work on detector characterization of the Advanced LIGO instrument, data analysis, and outreach. Welcome, Shivaraj!

Emanuele appears as a guest in this interesting article in Scientific American (now also in Nature), Big Bang Light Reveals Minimum Lifetime of Photons. The original paper is here.

Two papers by our group have been accepted in Physical Review Letters in the past few weeks.

The first paper, Gravito-Electromagnetic Perturbations of Kerr-Newman Black Holes: Stability and Isospectrality in the Slow-Rotation Limit , presents the first calculation of the coupled gravitational/electromagnetic oscillation modes of charged, rotating black holes. This is a difficult technical problem that we solved by working in the limit where the black hole spins slowly. Quite interestingly, we found that oscillations of opposite parity have the same oscillation frequencies up to linear order in the black hole rotation.

The second paper, Universality, maximum radiation and absorption in high-energy collisions of black holes with spin, is an interesting tale of “black hole cannibalism”: using numerical simulations, we showed that when two black holes collide at speeds close to the speed of light they “eat” (absorb) about half of the gravitational radiation produced in the process. This sets an upper limit to the maximum energy that can be radiated in high-speed black hole encounters. A story about this paper can be found in the Ole Miss News website.

ESA has recently published a call for White Papers describing science themes for the next large ESA missions L2 and L3 to be launched in 2028 and 2034. The White Paper The Gravitational Universe, supporting the case for a spaceborne low-frequency gravitational wave observatory to be launched in 2028, was submitted on May 24 and it is now available on the arXiv. You can join the ranks of Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne and many others who support the eLISA science case here.