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.

Teerthal Patel, Vanderbilt University, February 7, 12:00 pm

Primordial magnetogenesis from electroweak symmetry breaking

Magnetic fields are ubiquitous in the Universe, present across all scales and epochs. However, the origin of cosmological-scale fields—whether astrophysical or primordial—remains an open question. I will provide a brief overview of the observational constraints, evolution mechanism and possible origins of cosmological magnetic fields. In particular, observations suggest a lower bound of ~10−16 Gauss on large scales, supporting a primordial origin. Primordial magnetic fields can significantly impact cosmic recombination and structure formation and provide crucial insights into the high energy physics. In this talk, I focus on the epoch of electroweak symmetry breaking (EWSB) as a potential origin. Specifically, we examine the structure and dynamics of magnetic monopole-antimonopole pairs that arise within electroweak theory. We resolved the field configuration of static electroweak dumbbells using “constrained numerical relaxation” and simulated their annihilation, studying their lifetimes and magnetic relics. The topology of electroweak theory gives rise to monopole pairs confined by strings, whose distribution we determined through an extension of the Kibble mechanism. These monopole-antimonopole pairs undergo annihilation, leaving behind cosmological relic magnetic fields during the EWSB epoch in the early Universe. Our ongoing EWSB simulations study the generation of primordial magnetic fields and their potential impact on present-day cosmological magnetic properties.

Oem Trivedi, Ahmedabad University, India, February 21, 12:00 pm

Maura McLaughlin, West Virginia University, February 28, 12:00 pm

Andrea Derdzinski, Vanderbilt University, 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, April 11, 12:00 pm

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