PhD defense by Andrea Placidi

Gravitational wave modeling for eccentric binaries within the effective one-body approach

Abstract: 
Gravitational wave (GW) astronomy relies on an enormous amount of waveform templates, both to uncover new GW events and to properly infer the physical properties of their sources, primarily represented by coalescing compact binaries (CCBs) of black holes and/or neutron stars. In my PhD defense I will review the basics of the effective one-body (EOB) approach, which currently stands as the most complete and robust analytical framework to build templates for GWs radiated from CCBs during their entire evolution, from the early inspiral up to the ringdown phase after merger. I will then specialize the discussion to binary systems in motion along non-circular orbits and discuss the impact of their orbital eccentricity in the associated GW models. On this basis, I will introduce the audience to TEOBResumS-DALI, a state-of-the-art EOB model for non-circular binaries, and then discuss our proposal for analytically extending it by incorporating additional waveform information while also preserving the factorized and resummed waveform structure that characterize this model. I will finally assess the performance of the extended model we propose by comparing its predictions against numerically generated waveforms and fluxes of energy and angular momentum at infinity.

Supervisors: Gianluca Grignani and Troels Harmark

PhD committee: Emil Bjerrum-Bohr, Philippe Jetzer, Guillaume Faye