Physics Colloquium: “Gravitational Waves: From Black Holes to the Cosmos”

The Syracuse University Department of Physics is pleased to welcome Dr. Maximiliano Isi, Research Fellow at the Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA) of the Flatiron Institute in New York City.

Maximiliano Isi is a gravitational-wave astrophysicist using gravitational waves to learn about the nature of gravity, astrophysics and cosmology. Max is currently a Research Fellow at the Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA) of the Flatiron Institute in New York City. Before that, he was a NASA Einstein Fellow at MIT, where he was affiliated with the LIGO Laboratory and the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics. He obtained his PhD from Caltech in 2018, where he was also part of LIGO. He is currently a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the LISA Consortium.

“Gravitational waves: from black holes to the cosmos”

Gravitational waves reveal the universe through an entirely unique spectrum, complementary to electromagnetic and neutrino observations. Although the field is young, it has already revolutionized our understanding of black holes and neutron stars, with implications for gravity, stellar and galactic astrophysics, nuclear physics and cosmology. In this talk, Dr. Isi will review some of these results with a focus on black hole mergers—currently the most abundant source of gravitational waves. He will outline the astrophysical puzzle of heavy black-hole mergers, and explain how they manifest rich relativistic dynamics that can be leveraged to study physics and cosmology. As Dr. Isi will discuss, this is an exciting, observationally-driven field with abundant open questions, and which will continue to grow in the following decades thanks to the new and improved instruments. With the right analysis tools and theoretical foundation, the potential for discovery is unprecedented.