Gravitational waves are propagating ripples in space-time geometry, produced by the accelerated motion of massive astrophysical objects or by cosmological sources, and they have been first observed by the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational Observatory (LIGO) in September 2015, when the signal from coalescing black holes have been detected.
Since then, during the observation runs 1, 2 and 3 which spanned overall about 2 years, a grand total of 90 binary merger events have been detected, including one spectacular event involving two merging neutron stars, which have also triggered detection in all of the electro-magnetic spectrum.
The current observation run O4 started on May 24th 2023 and should lasting until the end of the year 2024.
Within the field of gravitational wave physics my line of research aims at maximizing the physics and astrophysics output of detections, which depends critically on faithful gravitational waveforms.
Coalescing binaries are privileged systems to study the two-body problem in General Relativity representing a mine of information for fundamental gravity, astrophysics and cosmology. Their signal is determined by the dynamics ruling the motion of the binary system, which for now we believe to coincide with General Relativity.
In particular recent works have shown that the computation of the General Relativistic, hence classical, dynamics of massive bodies can benefit from input from Quantum Field Theory scattering amplitude computation program, which has been so powerful and insightful in unveiling deep structures of elementary particle physics.
My main reserch goal is to work to connecting the amplitude program to the physics of gravitational waves. Better knowledge of the gravitational dynamics will impact research fields beyond fundamental physics.
On the cosmological side binary black holes are known to be standard sirens, which can be used to obtain an un-biased measure of luminosity distance. However gravitational wave observations are not capable in general to provide source redshifts, hence to apply their detection to the determination of cosmic expansion history they have to be complemented by redshift information obtained by direct electromagnetic detections or via statistical inference.