IAS Program on Particle Theory - Tail of Gravitational Waves, Quasi-normal Modes

Abstract

Quasi-normal modes (QNM) describe the return to equilibrium of a perturbed system, in particular the ring-down phase of a black hole merger. In this talk, the speaker will first review QNM of a Schwarzschild black hole. As a globally defined quantity, QNM is highly sensitive to global spacetime structure. For instance, placing a star far away from a black hole alters the QNM spectrum by a huge amount. The speaker and his research team will demonstrate analytically how to identify the QNM spectrum of a localized object from the global QNM. Finally, the speaker will mention some mysterious properties of black hole QNM spectrum in Einstein gravity.

About the speaker

Dr. Sam Wong received his BSc and PhD in Physics from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2011 and 2017 respectively. He was a recipient of the Croucher Foundation Fellowship in 2017 and a Visiting Scholar at University of Southern Denmark in 2018. He is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Physics of Columbia University.