A cura di
Emanuele Berti(University of Mississippi)
→
Europe/Rome
Aula Conversi (Dipartimento di Fisica - Ed. G. Marconi)
Aula Conversi
Dipartimento di Fisica - Ed. G. Marconi
Descrizione
Einstein's general relativity is 100 years old. Hailed by Bertrand Russell as "the greatest synthetic achievement of the human intellect", the theory has passed all experimental verifications with flying colors. Despite these triumphs, cosmological observations and theoretical considerations suggest that general relativity should be modified at some level.
Strong-field modifications of general relativity (if they occur in nature) are most likely to leave experimental signatures in compact objects such as black holes and neutron stars. The gravitational radiation emitted during the inspiral and merger of compact-object binaries encodes important information on their astrophysical formation mechanism, and it will allow us to test strong gravity in unprecedented ways. After a short review of current experimental verifications of general relativity, I will discuss potential smoking guns of modified gravity in gravitational-wave detectors, and the theoretical and observational challenges associated with their search.
