Gravity seminar - Tanja Hinderer Seminar

In the next few years, beginning in September 2015, the direct detection of gravitational waves from coalescing neutron star and black hole binaries by an international network of laser interferometers will become a realistic prospect. This will open the possibility for a wide range of unique science, however, realizing the science goals will require overcoming a variety of experimental and theoretical challenges. On the theoretical side, extracting the signals from the detector noise and deciphering the physics encoded in the waves will be contingent on having highly accurate template models for the dynamics and emitted gravitational waves. For coalescing black holes with any spins, the gravitational waves for comparable mass systems are well-modeled using an effective one-body (EOB) approach, which I will describe. In binaries with neutron stars, the presence of matter gives rise to a rich phenomenology in the gravitational waveforms which encodes information about the high-density nuclear equation of state. This, however, makes constructing accurate theoretical templates covering the entire parameter space for these sources more challenging. I will describe recent work on neutron star-black hole systems with different mass ratios, the diversity of features in the time-domain waveforms, and progress on a complete EOB model for such binaries informed by accurate numerical relativity data. I will also outline aspects requiring further work.