Thomas Baumgarte, Bowdoin College visited Strong
Prof. Thomas Baumgarte, Bowdoin College visited the Strong Group from January 8-15, 2023 to work with Vitor Cardoso and Jorge Exposito on critical collapse of scalar fields.
Prof. Baumgarte also gave a talk as part of the Gravity Seminar series on January 10, 2023 with the title ‘Critical Phenomena in Gravitational Collapse’.
Abstract: Critical Phenomena, including the appearance of universal scaling laws and critical exponents in the vicinity of phase transitions, appear in different fields of physics and beyond. Critical phenomena in gravitational collapse to black holes were first observed by Matt Choptuik about 30 years ago - a seminal discovery that launched an entire new field of research. While many aspects of critical collapse are well understood in the context of spherical symmetry, much less is known for systems that break spherical symmetry. In particular, this includes the perhaps most intriguing case, namely the collapse of vacuum gravitational waves. In this talk I will discuss the appearance of scaling laws and self-similarity close to the onset of black hole formation. I will review a number of attempts to reproduce early reports of these phenomena for the collapse of gravitational waves, leading up to results from current simulations. Based on these recent results I will suggest how our notion of criticality may have to be generalized in order to account for these phenomena in the absence of spherical symmetry. Slides from the talk can be found here
Read more about upcoming speakers at the Gravity Seminar series here.
About Prof. Thomas Baumgarte
Thomas Baumgarte is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Physics at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine (USA). He received his Diploma (1993) and Doctorate (1995) degrees from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet in Munich, Germany, but carried out most of his dissertation research at Cornell University. He held a post-doctoral position at the University of Illinois before joining the faculty at Bowdoin College in 2001. His work in numerical relativity and relativistic astrophysics has been recognized with Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Physical Society (APS), and the Simons Foundation, as well as with the Bessel Research Prize of the Humboldt Foundation. He co-authored, together with Stuart Shapiro, the textbook Numerical Relativity: Solving Einstein’s Equations on the Computer (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and more recently Numerical Relativity: Starting from Scratch (Cambridge University Press, 2021).