Speaker
Alex Nielsen
Description
When you hit a drum, it vibrates and emits a sound. When you hit a black hole, it also vibrates and emits gravitational waves. Hitting black holes is not very easy, but fortunately nature does it for us with black hole collisions. Remarkably, general relativity predicts that the vibration of a black hole is rather simple. The spectrum of vibrational modes depends only on the mass and angular momentum of the black hole. Thus if you can detect multiple vibrational modes of the black hole, you can test whether it really is a black hole according to general relativity. Here I will discuss prospects for detecting multiple modes from black holes using gravitational waves, both on the ground (LIGO) and in space (LISA).
