VandyGRAF

Vanderbilt initiative for gravity, waves, and fluids

VandyGRAF Initiative

VandyGRAF Initiative

The Vanderbilt Initiative for Gravity, Waves, and Fluids is an interdisciplinary research venture providing mathematicians, physicists, and astrophysicists with the resources and space to connect and collaboratively work on problems of outstanding scientific merit, such as:

  • General relativity: theoretical, mathematical, numerical, or experimental, including, but not restricted to, black holes, gravitational radiation, and multimessenger astrophysics.
  • Fluid mechanics: theoretical, mathematical, numerical, or experimental, including, but not restricted to, relativistic fluids far from equilibrium.
  • Evolution of partial differential equations related to fluids and gravity, including, but not restricted to, the geometric analysis of waves and fluids.
  • The physics and mathematics of neutron star mergers and high-energy nuclear collisions.

VandyGRAF Seminar Series

All VandyGRAF talks will take place in the Chapel in the 17th&Horton building, unless indicated below.

Maura McLaughlin, Vanderbilt University, February 28, 12:00 pm, Room A1013

The Discovery and Promise of Fast Radio Bursts

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are events only a few milliseconds in duration that occur at random locations on the sky at a rate of a few thousand per day. Several thousand FRBs are currently known. While it is now well established that they have a cosmological origin, and about 10% of all currently known sources have been seen to exhibit multiple bursts, the origins of these enigmatic sources are poorly understood. I will review the 2007 discovery of FRBs and present some of the highlights from the vast body of work by an international community since that time, and also describe the current best guesses on their origins and discuss cosmological insights that studies of FRBs will enable.

Jack Holguin, University of Manchester, UK, March 7, 12:00 pm

Revealing simple scaling laws in heavy ion jets with Energy Correlators

The quark-gluon plasma (QGP) is an extreme state of hot nuclear matter. Small QGP droplets are produced in heavy-ion collisions at collider experiments, leaving imprints on the radiation sprays (jets) generated in these events. Recently, the CMS Collaboration released the first measurements of energy correlators on jets in lead-lead collisions, revealing significant modifications compared to proton-proton baselines. These modifications establish energy correlators as powerful probes of QGP properties. However, interpreting these results is challenging due to experimental biases that complicate the measurement.

I will discuss the first analytical predictions for these measurements and introduce a novel energy-energy correlator (EEC) cross-ratio that reduces biases by an order of magnitude while preserving sensitivity to the QGP. Using the light-ray operator product expansion, I will also show that nuclear modifications in this measurement are characterised by an enhanced twist-4 matrix element, which directly encodes properties of the quark-gluon plasma.

Rachel Steinhorst, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, March 21, 12:00 pm

Rebecca Surman, University of Notre Dame, March 28, 12:00 pm

Janice Houston, Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, April 4, 12:00 pm

Blake Temple, University of California, Davis, April 11, 12:00 pm

Gregory Galloway, University of Miami, April 25, 12:00 pm