Université de GenèveDépartement de Physique ThéoriqueCAP Genève

Gravitational waves

In the theory of Einstein, gravity manifests itself by means of a dynamical space and time;
according to this vision, gravitational waves (GW) can be thought as "ripples" of space-time.

An artist's vision fo the gravitational waves created by an inspiralling binary

More concretely, the effect of a gravitational wave passing by is an oscillatory (tiny) variation of the distance between two free-falling bodies. It is by measuring such variations through the km-sized interferometers LIGO and VIRGO, that scientists have recently detected GW's.

GW are produced by enormous quantities of accelerating mass, occurring in such events as supernovae explosions and binary mergers, but also in violent phenomena that took place in the earliest epochs of the Universe.

Gravitational waves had already been indirectly observed in the Nobel Prize-awarded work by Hulse-Taylor. This has provided a precise confirmation of Einstein's theory of General Relativity. The recent direct detection (but also their possible indirect observation in the CMB) will provide even more stringent test on General Relativity as well as a completely new window on our Universe: as ordinary matter is basically transparent to GW's, we can in fact use them to get informations from regions inaccessible to photon-based observations, like for example the internal composition of stars, or the state of the Universe before the CMB epoch.

Recent publications and presentations on this topic
Date: 21. March 2019
Members involved: Enis Belgacem, Stefano Foffa, Michele Maggiore
Topics: Gravitational waves, Early Universe, Dark energy, Modified gravity, Dark matter
Type: Publication
Date: 29. October 2018
Members involved: Gabriele Franciolini, Valerio De Luca, Antonio Riotto
Topics: Primordial Black Holes, Gravitational waves
Type: Publication
Date: 29. October 2018
Members involved: Gabriele Franciolini, Valerio De Luca, Antonio Riotto
Topics: Primordial Black Holes, Gravitational waves
Type: Publication
Date: 22. May 2018
Members involved: Enis Belgacem, Yves Dirian, Stefano Foffa, Michele Maggiore
Topics: Gravitational waves, Modified gravity
Type: Publication
Date: 23. April 2018
Members involved: Davide Racco, Antonio Riotto
Topics: Inflation, Gravitational waves, Standard Model
Type: Publication
Date: 21. December 2017
Members involved: Enis Belgacem, Yves Dirian, Stefano Foffa, Michele Maggiore
Topics: Gravitational waves, Modified gravity
Type: Publication
Date: 15. February 2016
Members involved: Ignacy Sawicki
Topics: Gravitational waves, Modified gravity
Type: Publication
Date: 6. October 2015
Members involved: Vittorio Tansella, Ruth Durrer
Topics: Cosmic microwave background, lensing, Gravitational waves
Type: Publication
Date: 12. November 2014
Members involved: Matteo Biagetti
Topics: Inflation, Gravitational waves
Type: Publication
Date: 27. June 2014
Members involved: Martin Kunz, Ignacy Sawicki
Topics: Anisotropic stress, Modified gravity, Gravitational waves, Large-scale structure, Dark energy
Type: Publication

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Université de Genève
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