Dr. Davide Racco – Postdoc at ETH and UZH
In 2015, the first observations of the gravitational waves emitted by the merger of two black holes occurred 1.4 billion years ago, marked the first direct measurement of these spacetime ripples, and the beginning of the gravitational wave astronomy era. The measurements of the network of laser interferometers LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA have disclosed to us a hundred of mergers of black holes, allowing us a glimpse into the population of these objects in our cosmos, and the confirmation that gravitational waves travel at the speed of light.
A second landmark in this field was achieved in 2023 after decades of measures of the arrival times of the radio signals from rotating neutron stars. This revealed for the first time a background of gravitational waves, that is background noise of such waves in our Universe.
In my talk, I will give an overview of these impressive developments, and of what we could learn from a perspective of fundamental physics thanks to this novel observational window in our Universe. I will focus in particular on what we could learn about the particle content of the Universe and its cosmological history.
Publications
Recording
https://video.ethz.ch/events/2024/theory/9e476008-0584-41c1-98e6-c44ea3aa8ad2.html