TPPC weekly seminar (in-person): Mark Hannam - "When theory can't keep up with experiment: the looming spectre of systematics in gravitational-wave astronomy"

Wednesday 22 Nov 2023, 12:30 → 14:00 Europe/London

Strand Building, S7.06

Speaker: Mark Hannam (Cardiff University)

Title: When theory can't keep up with experiment: the looming spectre of systematics in gravitational-wave astronomy 

Abstract: This is a talk about waveform modelling for gravitational-wave astronomy. Abstracts for such talks invariably begin with sentiments like, "Accurate models are essential to measure the properties of the black holes and neutron stars that produce our gravitational-wave observations," but with the unspoken understanding that of course such models will be available. And indeed, models successfully stayed ahead of improving detector sensitivities for most of the ~80 detections in the first three LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observing runs. But they failed spectacularly for one of the most interesting signals in O3, and the situation has not substantially improved for the current observing run, O4. I will summarise the current situation and challenges for the future, in particular those facing numerical relativity simulations.