Speaker
Description
To date, the most precise tests of General Relativity have been achieved
through pulsar timing, albeit in the weak-field regime. Since pulsars are
some of the most precise and stable "clocks" in the Universe, present
observational efforts are focused on detecting pulsars in the vicinity of
supermassive black holes (most notably in the Galactic Centre), enabling
pulsar timing to be used as an extremely precise probe of strong-gravity
regime.
In this work, test-particle dynamics is described in general black-hole
spacetimes and used to study binary systems comprising a pulsar orbiting
a black hole. It is shown that, by adopting a fully general-relativistic
description of test-particle motion, independent of any particular theory
of gravity, observations of pulsars give reliable constraints on
alternative theories of gravity.
