MSc Defense: Conor Dyson

On August 23, 2023 at 12.00 in meeting room Hb1 at Blegdamsvej, Conor Dyson will defend his master thesis supervised by Vitor Cardoso and Maarten van de Meent. Censor will be Marta Orselli, University of Perugia. The thesis defense will be in English.

Title: Particle plunges and Penrose processes

Abstract:

LISA  is scheduled to launch in the coming decades and promises to open a new era of gravitational wave astronomy. Amongst the plethora of novel sources, LISA will be able to detect, Extreme mass ratio inspirals (EMRIs) are expected to be one of the most interesting in opening our eyes to the secrets hidden in the spacetime geometry around black holes.  Detecting EMRIs will allow us to very accurately map the geometry around massive black holes and are expected to provide detailed information on the environments in which black holes exist and the existence of additional fundamental fields. In order to accurately model these systems one performs perturbation theory on top of the geometry of the larger black hole through a formalism known as gravitational self-force where the trajectory of the smaller body is given by perturbed geodesic motion. In this defense, I will discuss some recent work supporting these self-force calculations wherein I derive analytical solutions to plunging geodesics in the Kerr geometry, implementing these solutions in the Black Hole perturbation toolkit. In addition to modeling orbital trajectories, in the interest of  LISAs applications for the testing of fundamental physics, I will also discuss the qualitatively different structure of test-particle motion in the presence of additional fundamental fields. Namely in the regime of Einstein-Maxwell theory where we find many new phenomena which occur when one allows for systems with both magnetic and electric charges.