Topic: Gravitational Wave Propagation in Black Hole Spacetime
Speaker: Prof.Jianhua He
Coordinates: PCFT C1124, 16:00, Tuesday, March 3
Abstract: Understanding wave propagation within black hole spacetimes remains a long-standing challenge in general relativity. In contrast to flat Minkowski space, the breakdown of Huygens’ principle in curved geometries means that finite wave packets do not maintain sharp trailing wavefronts; instead, they develop persistent, continuously decaying 'tails.' Furthermore, these perturbations may excite the black hole’s characteristic quasi-normal modes (QNMs). Wave propagation within a black hole is thus a complex superposition of three distinct phenomena: trajectory bending, QNM excitation, and late-time tail formation—an interplay further complicated by the intricate 3D spatial geometry of black hole systems.
Despite their importance, these issues remain less addressed in the literature. In this talk, I will present our recent progress in this topic. I will describe the numerical techniques developed to simulate these effects within a Schwarzschild black hole and highlight the unique signatures imprinted on gravitational waveforms as they interact with a black hole. Finally, I will discuss the potential detectability of these phenomena in Advanced LIGO (aLIGO) and their implication for black hole physics and astrophysics.