Gravity and astrophysics at UMiss

Our recent Physical Review Letters paper and the companion Physical Review D article are nicely covered by Edwin Smith for Ole Miss News.

The article received media coverage from New Scientist, phys.org, Science Daily, the Physics Today blog, the Portuguese newspaper Expresso and the Italian website Gaia News. It was also featured on the front page of the APS website and as an APS Physics Synopsis.

The idea is that ultralight bosons with nonzero mass can produce a “black hole bomb” - a strong instability that would extract energy from the black hole very quickly and spin the hole down. However we do observe spinning black holes in the Universe. These observations can be used to set bounds on the mass of hypothetical massive photons. With this technique we constrained the mass of the photon to be about one hundred times smaller than the previously accepted bound.

Students from Tougaloo college visited the Department of Physics and Astronomy on 9/25/2012. Besides meeting our faculty they took a walk around campus (including a tour of the National Center for Physical Acoustics and of the Center for Manufacturing Excellence) and heard about career opportunities in physics and other STEM disciplines. This visit was supported in part by Emanuele’s NSF CAREER Award.

This is a picture of the whole group, including amazing Dr. Donald Cole (watch this video!), around James Meredith’s statue. This is a special year for Ole Miss: we are commemorating the 50th anniversary of the enrollment of James Meredith with a series of events on Opening the Closed Society.

The building you can see in the back is the Physics Department (Lewis Hall).

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, 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, postdoc Michael Horbatsch, and several graduate students.

More information on the gravity group in Mississippi is available at the following URL:

http://www.phy.olemiss.edu/GR/

The successful applicant is expected to engage in a collaborative research program involving several institutions, including Caltech and Princeton in the USA, Lisbon, Barcelona, 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 sent before 12/31/2012, and possibly earlier. Late applications may be considered until the position is filled.

Davide spent the summer at the California Institute of Technology working on a LIGO REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) project supervised by Emanuele Berti and Yanbei Chen. He will visit Ole Miss until December to work on his Laurea thesis at the University of Milan under the joint supervision of Emanuele and Giuseppe Lodato. In collaboration with Ulrich Sperhake, Michael Kesden and others, Davide will study the dynamics of spinning, precessing black hole binaries. Welcome Davide!

We just learned very good news from the National Science Foundation. On August 23, the National Science Board met to discuss (among other topics)  the change in scope for Advanced LIGO that would be needed to install a LIGO detector in India. They approved the following resolution:

“RESOLVED, that the National Science Board authorize the Deputy Director at her discretion to approve the proposed Advanced LIGO Project change in scope, enabling plans for the relocation of an advanced detector to India.”

This decision brings us a lot closer to seeing LIGO-India as a scientific reality. Many thanks go to all in the LIGO Laboratory, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, and the National Science Foundation that made this possible!