Ravi Kopparapu - Postdoctoral Scholar
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Physical Address:334D Whitmore Laboratory |
Mailing Address:The Pennsylvania State University |
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Research Interests
Gravitational-wave Astrophysics
I am invloved in projects studying the sources of gravitational-waves that are relevant to ground based gravitational-wave (GW) detector LIGO and proposed space based gravitational-wave detector, LISA. At present I am working on the following:
- Generating Galactic Double white dwarf (DWD) population using population synthesis codes (specifically Hurley et al.(2002)) and studying various evolutionary phases that map on to the GW amplitude-frequency space of LISA. With help of this mapping and theoretical constraints on the properties of DWDs, one can identify whether a given system falls into a distinct sub-domain of astrophysical interest such as a progenitor of Type IA supernovae or an AM CVn system etc. If the system's frequency evolution is not measurable, then once can put bounds on the system's parameters such as the individual component masses and also on the distance to the system.
- In collaboration with Pablo Laguna, Deidre Shoemaker, Sam Finn, Richard O'Shaughnessy and Birjoo Vaishnav, I am working on the problem of how one can utilize numerical relativity (NR) GW waveforms as templates for LIGO data analysis. Ultimately the goal is to use these NR waveforms for detecting the inspiral and mergers of binary black holes (BBH) or binary neutron star (BNS) systems. But at the moment we are in the testing phase where the plan is to inject test-NR waveforms into a simulated LIGO data and detect them using some standard post-Newtonian templates (Blanchet et al.(1996)).
Other projects that are in progress are gravitational waves from pulsar kicks that are caused by neutrino emission during a supernova (Richard O'Shaughnessy and Sam Finn), the pre and post evolutionary stages of hot sub dwarf stars (Richard wade), association of Gamma-ray burst sources from SWIFT satellite in LIGO's data (Richard O'Shaughnessy and Derek Fox) and habitability of extrasolar planets (James Kasting PSU, Vikki Meadows JPL).
