| NSF Org: |
PHY Division Of Physics |
| Recipient: |
|
| Initial Amendment Date: | May 23, 2019 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | July 28, 2021 |
| Award Number: | 1912632 |
| Award Instrument: | Continuing Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Pedro Marronetti
pmarrone@nsf.gov (703)292-7372 PHY Division Of Physics MPS Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences |
| Start Date: | September 1, 2019 |
| End Date: | August 31, 2023 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $450,000.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $584,540.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2020 = $150,000.00 FY 2021 = $284,540.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
|
| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
1 LOMB MEMORIAL DR ROCHESTER NY US 14623-5603 (585)475-7987 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
|
| Primary Place of Performance: |
1 Lomb memorial Dr. Rochester NY US 14623-5603 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
|
| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
|
| Parent UEI: |
|
| NSF Program(s): |
Gravity Theory, PHYSICS-BROADEN PARTICIPATION, Integrative Activities in Phys |
| Primary Program Source: |
01002021DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01002122DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
|
| Program Element Code(s): |
|
| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.049 |
ABSTRACT
Gravitational Wave Astronomy promises to provide a revolutionary new view of the universe that can probe previously unknown regions, including the interiors of neutron stars, collisions of black holes, which emit energy at luminosities exceeding the entire visible universe, and even remnants of the big bang. To gain new insights into the dynamics of the universe, gravitational wave astronomers need to be able to infer the nature of the sources from the observed signals. The physical parameters of these sources can be extracted from the observed signals if the dependence of the waveform on source parameters is known to sufficiently high-accuracy. This award supports the numerical modeling of merging black-hole binaries using simulations on supercomputers. These simulations will allow a deeper understanding of extreme gravity phenomena as well as tests of Einstein's theory of general relativity in strong field regimes.
The principal goals of this research will be to produce waveforms for LIGO source parametrization efforts, and to model the remnant mass, spin, and gravitational recoil from highly-precessing spinning binary black holes in order to these parameters and how they affect the spatial distribution and growth of black holes. The PI's team will produce and publicly release gravitational waveforms in previously unsampled regions of parameter space for LIGO data analysis, to directly use these waveforms for studies and modeling of binary black holes dynamics, and will improve the accuracy and efficiency of the numerical simulations. This project will keep the RIT group at the forefront of black holes supercomputer simulations involving students and postdoctoral fellows.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
Note:
When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external
site maintained by the publisher. Some full text articles may not yet be available without a
charge during the embargo (administrative interval).
Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from
this site.
PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
We made four releases of the RIT public catalog of numerical relativityblack-hole-binary waveforms in http://ccrg.rit.edu/~RITCatalog,consisting of 1881 accurate simulations of inspiraling binary systemswith mass ratios q = m1/m2 in the range 1/128 ≤ q ≤ 1 and individual spinsup to s/m^2 = 0.95; including 824 in eccentric orbits in the range 0 < e ≤ 1.The catalog also provides initial parameters of the binary, trajectoryinformation, peak radiation, and final remnant black hole properties.As an application of this waveform catalog we reanalyze all of the peakradiation and remnant properties to find new, simple, correlations among them,valid in the presence of eccentricity, for practical astrophysical usage.We applied our approach to the LIGO-Virgo detection GW190521 and found that it is the most consistent with a highly eccentricmerger within our set of waveforms.
We explicitly demonstrate that current numerical relativity techniquesare able to accurately evolve black hole binaries with mass ratios ofthe order of 1000:1. This proof of principle is relevant for future thirdgeneration (3G) gravitational wave detectors and space mission LISA.This work represents a first step towards the considerable challengeof construction of a catalog by applying numerical-relativity waveformsto interpreting gravitational-wave observations by LISA and next-generationground-based gravitational-wave detectors.
We performed a series of 1381 full numerical simulations of high energycollision of black holes to search for the maximum recoil velocity aftertheir merger. We consider equal mass binaries with opposite spinspointing along their orbital plane and perform a search of spin orientations,impact parameters, and initial linear momenta to find the maximum recoilfor a given spin magnitude s. This spin sequence for s=0.4, 0.7, 0.8, 0.85,0.9 is then extrapolated to the extreme case, s=1, to obtain an estimatedmaximum recoil velocity of 28,562±342km/s, thus approximately bounded by10% of the speed of light.
In a broader impact research, we extracted individual pulses of Vela(PSR B0833-45 / J0835-4510) from daily observationsof over three hours (around 120,000 pulses per observation),performed simultaneously with the two radio telescopes at the ArgentineInstitute of Radioastronomy and study their statistical properties withmachine learning techniques. We thus determined 4 clusters of pulsessupporting models for four emitting regions at different heights(separated each by roughly a hundred km) in the pulsar magnetosphere.
Nicole Rosato, fully supported by this grant was the first mathematicalmodeling Ph.D. student graduates from newly stablished RIT program:https://www.rit.edu/science/news/first-mathematical-modeling-phd-student-graduates-rit
Last Modified: 11/30/2023
Modified by: Carlos O Lousto
Please report errors in award information by writing to: awardsearch@nsf.gov.
