Speaker
Description
The detection of gravitational waves from colliding black holes has opened a new frontier in the study of gravity — the eXtreme gravity regime, where spacetime dynamics are both violently strong and relentlessly dynamical. These signals carry a wealth of information about the fundamental laws governing gravity, and we are only now beginning to decode them. In this talk, I will focus on the ringdown phase, the final act of a black hole merger, when the remnant rings like a cosmic bell before settling down. I will discuss how to model this regime within effective field theory extensions of general relativity, and how recent analyses are already beginning to leverage ringdown observations to probe — and potentially reveal — deviations from Einstein’s theory. The question remains: will the ringdown continue to confirm relativity, or will it expose cracks in its foundation?
