RESEARCH INTERESTS

Where and how do black holes form and merge in our Universe? What can future detections of massive black hole inspirals and electromagnetic counterparts tell us about the large scale evolution of our Universe? How do black holes interact in vacuum and in gaseous environments, and how can we probe their nature from studying the light emitted from their accretion of matter?

These are some of the key problems we are discussing at daily basis; but with the growing number of diverse and creative people joining our initiative, new ideas and research areas are constantly being pushed!

Gravitational Wave Astrophysics: Since the first pioneering gravitational wave observation in 2015 by LIGO/Virgo of two merging black holes, we have now seen ~100 stellar mass black hole mergers with many more to come in the near future. This has sparked a new research field with unique potential to gain insight into how black holes form, grow and interact over cosmic time. At the NBIA we are developing new ideas and computational tools for describing these processes, currently with a special focus on the dynamical formation of merging black hole binaries. We are also working on the yet undetected mergers of supermassive black holes. Such events result from the pairings of black holes millions to billions of times more massive than our Sun in the center of galaxies. Detection of supermassive black hole mergers, expected in the coming decade, will offer the next great milestone in gravitational wave astrophysics, lending insight into the formation of the biggest black holes in our Universe, and their mutual evolution with their host galaxies. Ultimately, we aim to build a multi-messenger approach, providing predictions that combine both electromagnetic and gravitational wave observables into a tool kit that will help us to unravel the mysteries of black hole binary formation and merger from the smallest to the biggest black holes in our Universe.

Black Holes and Accretion Discs: Black holes and compact objects constitute laboratories for gravitational physics, but they do not exist in a vacuum. These objects interact with their astrophysical environments, ultimately allowing us to study them in the electromagnetic (and gravitational wave) spectrum. Astrophysical fluid dynamics is a necessary tool for modeling and learning from these environmental interactions. At the NBIA we work on a wide variety of problems in astrophysical fluid dynamics and magnetohydrodynamics. Current areas of interest include accretion flows onto black holes, tidal disruption of stars by black holes, the orbital evolution of binary black holes in gas disks, and the possible electromagnetic signatures resulting from circumbinary accretion. All of these problems are tackled with a very wide perspective, ranging from fundamental theoretical aspects to state-of-the-art simulations that make it possible to link theory with observations.