Tanja Bode - Graduate Student
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Physical Address:301C Whitmore Laboratory |
Mailing Address:The Pennsylvania State University |
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Research Interests
Distorted Black Holes
My research interests extend into many different facets of gravity and astrophysics. Within the past year I have been working in the numerical relativity group under Deirdre Shoemaker and Pablo Laguna. My research has focused thus far on distorted black holes and nonlinear mode coupling in the outgoing gravitational waves.
Distorted black holes occur at the end of the merger phase of a black hole and some other large body. In order to skip simulating the entire inspiral and merger phase, and to have more control over the distortion, we choose to cause distortion by impinging a Schwarzschild or Kerr black hole with Teukolsky gravitational waves. The distorted black hole then gives off gravitational waves in its efforts to reach a stationary state. The gravitational waves emitted by a distorted black hole are a combination of quasi-normal ringing and some nonlinear effects. By exciting only specific modes, we wish to look at how the nonlinear dynamics of strong-field gravity mixes those modes in the outgoing gravitational waves. By understanding such mixing, we could hopefully get more information about the sources whose gravitational waves are detected by observatories such as LIGO and LISA.
