János Takátsy and Lorenz Zwick receive EU MSCA Fellowships
János Takátsy has been awarded a two-year EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship to work on the project “Cosmic Bells: Unveiling the composition of neutron stars with tidal oscillations” with Johan Samsing in the Theoretical Astrophysics group. János received his PhD from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest in 2024 and joined NBIA as a postdoctoral fellow the same year.
Neutron stars are among the densest objects in our Universe, however, what constitutes their interior remains unanswered. Recent studies suggest the existence of quark matter inside the heaviest neutron stars, while there is also growing speculation about the presence of dark matter inside them. While equilibrium properties of neutron stars, such as their mass and radius, provide limited information about their detailed composition, dynamical signatures can be essential in this regard. Such dynamical signatures are tidal oscillations, which can influence the evolution of binary inspirals. With the advancement of gravitational-wave observatories, there is now a unique opportunity to explore neutron star composition through their dynamical imprint on compact binary mergers.
As a Marie Curie Fellow, János will combine field theoretical predictions with few-body simulations to answer the questions: what can we learn about exotic matter inside neutron stars from tidal oscillations and their impact on compact binary inspirals? This work will facilitate new methods for neutron star composition studies, which are pivotal for understanding the nature of strongly interacting matter.
Lorenz Zwick will awarded a two-year EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship to work on a project titled “AstroWaveforms: Decoding the astrophysics of black hole binaries in individual gravitational wave signals.” in the Theoretical Astrophysics group at the NBIA. Lorenz received his PhD from the University of Zürich in September 2023 and joined the NBIA as a postdoctoral fellow in the Fall of the same year.
A decade after the first detection of gravitational waves (GW), many of the most fundamental aspects of binary black hole (BH) astrophysics remain unanswered: Where are binaries preferentially formed? Which astrophysical mechanisms shape observable binary properties? How do such mechanisms couple to in-spiralling GW sources? Despite the increasing number of signals in the LIGO/Virgo/Kagra (LVK) catalogue, progress in answering these outstanding questions is proving to be extremely challenging and perhaps unattainable within the current framework of population-based statistical analysis. The growing field of “environmental effects” provides an exciting opportunity to overcome these limitations, by allowing to extract astrophysical information from individual GW signals. The aim of Lorenz’s Marie Curie project is to develop novel models of environmental effects that capture smoking gun signatures of black hole binary environments, and are able to enrich vacuum waveform templates with astrophysical perturbations informed directly from cutting-edge numerical simulations.
Lorenz's work will demonstrate how the detection of environmental effects can be harnessed to reveal the physics of black hole environments and distinguish between binary formation pathways. Next generation gravitational wave detectors are on the horizon, and theoretical work with the aim of maximising their scientific yield will drastically increase in relevance over the next decade