During the 2024–25 academic year, the CMSA will be hosting a seminar on General Relativity, organized by Uri Kol and Puskar Mondal.
This seminar will take place on Tuesdays from 11:00 am – 12:00 pm (Eastern time). The meetings will take place in Room G10 at the CMSA, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge MA 02138, and some meetings will take place virtually on Zoom or be held in hybrid formats.
To learn how to attend, please fill out this form to join the mailing list.
The schedule will be updated as talks are confirmed.
Abstract: According to general relativity, the remnant of a binary black hole merger should be a perturbed Kerr black hole. Perturbed Kerr black holes emit “ringdown” radiation which is well described by a superposition of quasinormal modes, with frequencies and damping times that depend only on the mass and spin of the remnant. Therefore the observation […]
Abstract: In this talk, we briefly introduce our recent work on establishing the global existence and stability to the future of non-linear perturbation of de Sitter-like solutions to the Einstein-Yang-Mills system in n≥4 spacetime dimension. This generalizes Friedrich’s (1991) Einstein-Yang-Mills stability results in dimension n=4 to all higher dimensions. This is a joint work with […]
Abstract: We study the small perturbations of the $1+3$-dimensional Milne model for the Einstein-Klein-Gordon (EKG) system. We prove the nonlinear future stability, and show that the perturbed spacetimes are future causally geodesically complete. For the proof, we work within the constant mean curvature (CMC) gauge and focus on the $1+3$ splitting of the Bianchi-Klein-Gordon equations. […]
Abstract: The nonlinear stability of the slowly-rotating Kerr-de Sitter family was first proven by Hintz and Vasy in 2016 using microlocal techniques. In my talk, I will present a novel proof of the nonlinear stability of slowly-rotating Kerr-de Sitter spacetimes that avoids frequency-space techniques outside of a neighborhood of the trapped set. The proof uses […]
General Relativity Seminar Speaker: Professor Harvey Reall (University of Cambridge) Title: The second law of black hole mechanics in effective field theory Abstract: I shall discuss the second law of black hole mechanics in gravitational theories with higher derivative terms in the action. Wall has described a method for defining an entropy that satisfies the second law […]
General Relativity Seminar Title: The Gregory-Laflamme instability of black strings revisited Abstract: In this talk I will discuss our recent work that reproduces and extends the famous work of Lehner and Pretorius on the end point of the Gregory-Laflamme instability of black strings. We consider black strings of different thicknesses and our numerics allow us to get closer to the singularity than ever before. In […]
https://youtu.be/1v9STFWqArQ General Relativity Seminar Speaker: Nikolaos Athanasiou Title: A scale-critical trapped surface formation criterion for the Einstein-Maxwell system Abstract: Few notions within the realm of mathematical physics succeed in capturing the imagination and inspiring awe as well as that of a black hole. First encountered in the Schwarzschild solution, discovered a few months after the […]
https://youtu.be/nfausHrja-Y General Relativity Seminar Speaker: Marcelo Disconzi, Vanderbilt University Title: General-relativistic viscous fluids Abstract: The discovery of the quark-gluon plasma that forms in heavy-ion collision experiments provides a unique opportunity to study the properties of matter under extreme conditions, as the quark-gluon plasma is the hottest, smallest, and densest fluid known to humanity. Studying the quark-gluon plasma also provides a window into […]
General Relativity Seminar Speaker: Uri Kol, CMSA Title: Duality in Einstein’s Gravity Abstract: Electric-Magnetic duality has been a key feature behind our understanding of Quantum Field Theory for over a century. In this talk I will describe a similar property in Einstein’s gravity. The gravitational duality reveals, in turn, a wide range of new IR phenomena, including […]
https://youtu.be/6tjqDpT9f-k General Relativity Seminar Speaker: Professor Oscar Dias (University of Southampton) Title: Strong Cosmic Censorship Abstract: Generically, strong cosmic censorship (SCC) is the statement that physics within general relativity should be predicted from initial data prescribed on a Cauchy hypersurface. In this talk I will review how fine-tuned versions of SCC have been formulated and evolved along the […]
https://youtu.be/tpmm618NjtE General Relativity Seminar Speaker: Sergei Dubovsky (New York University) Title: Love Symmetry of Black Holes Abstract: Perturbations of massless fields in the Kerr-Newman black hole background enjoy a ("Love") SL(2,ℝ) symmetry in the suitably defined near zone approximation. We show how the intricate behavior of black hole responses in four and higher dimensions can be […]
General Relativity Seminar Speaker: Naqing Xie (Fudan University) Title: Gravitational Wave, Angular Momentum, and Supertranslation Ambiguity Abstract: The supertranslation ambiguity of angular momentum is a long-standing and conceptually important issue in general relativity. Recently, there appeared the first definition of angular momentum at null infinity that is supertranslation invariant. However, in the compact binary coalescence community, supertranslation […]