Gravity Seminar: Investigating mysteries in modern physics with gravitational waves, Helvi Witek, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, U.S.A.

The detection of 90+ gravitational wave signals produced by coalescing black holes or neutron stars have opened up a rich discovery space for astrophysics, gravitation, particle and dark matter physics, and cosmology. They offer a new observational channel to address long-standing questions about the nature of gravity, decade old mysteries about the nature of dark matter (that makes up more than 80% of all matter) or the nature of matter under extreme conditions. To identify signatures of “new physics” in gravitational wave observations we need precise gravitational wave models.

In this talk I will give a brief summary of recent and future observations, and I will present an overview of recent advances in numerically modelling black holes in dark matter environments, coupled to beyond-standard model particles or in well motivated extensions of general relativity.

Short Bio: 
Helvi Witek is an expert on gravitational wave physics, numerical relativity and strong-field tests of gravity. After receiving her PhD at the University of Lisbon, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge and the University of Nottingham. Helvi was a Marie-Curie Fellow at the University of Barcelona and a Royal Society University Research Fellow in London, before joining the faculty at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign as an assistant professor. Helvi is co-chair of the LISA Waveform Working Group and co-PI of the Einstein Toolkit cyberinfrastructure for computational astrophysics.