Thesis award to black hole spectroscopy measurements
Strong member Gregorio Carullo received a prize from his Alma Mater, the University of Pisa, for the best PhD thesis in the field of Mathematics, Physics, Computer Science and Geoscience, defended in 2022.
The prize was awarded at a ceremony held on December 2, 2023.
The thesis entitled 'Black Hole Spectroscopy: from a mathematical problem to an observational reality' was written under the supervision of Prof. Walter Del Pozzo, and deals with the construction and application of a novel data analysis framework capable of extracting black holes' "vibrational frequencies" from the gravitational-wave data collected by the LIGO and Virgo interferometers. In the thesis, such characteristic "normal modes" of the system were leveraged to explore many questions in fundamental physics, and to search for imprints of new particles or new gravitational degrees of freedom.
The thesis can be found here: Black Hole Spectroscopy: from a mathematical problem to an observational reality