Black holes as ringing bells in and beyond general relativity

• Marco Melis (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare)

The discovery of gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger, detected by LIGO and Virgo, has launched a new era of black hole physics. The last phase of such intriguing coalescing phenomena is called "ringdown" and is characterized by the final black hole which settles to its equilibrium configuration via the emission of gravitational waves. The latter are described by the quasi normal modes, damped oscillation modes that represent a gravitational fingerprint of the black hole response to perturbations. In this talk we will see why quasi normal modes are important to test general relativity and what they can tell us about fascinating theories beyond Einstein's gravity.

Dicussion

Simple Models of your Brain: modeling intelligence with Recurrent Neural Networks

• Enrico Ventura

Statistical mechanics has made significant contributions to the study of biological neural systems by modeling them as recurrent networks of interconnected units with adjustable interactions. Several iterative procedures have been proposed to optimize the neural connections to enable network tasks such as information storage (i.e. associative memory) and learning probability distributions from data (i.e. generative modeling). I will present how physics can model the emergence of memory and creativity in the brain by providing a few examples of unsupervised learning algorithms on recurrent neural networks.

Discussion