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CENTRA is awarded access to supercomputer

Feb. 22, 2010

From astrophysics to high-energy physics and quantum gravity, black holes have acquired an ever increasing role in fundamental physics. Now, a team led by a CENTRA member has been awarded top-priority computational time in a supercomputer to study black holes and Einstein's equations numerically.Supermassive black holes lurk at the center of many galaxies, while million of stellar-mass black holes populate the galaxies and power violent processes such as gamma-ray bursts. These sources are the strongest emitters of gravitational waves to be observed with interferometers such as LIGO. In high energy physics, the gauge-gravity duality has taught us how black hole dynamics in AdS can be applied to understand the experimental program on heavy ion collisions. Furthermore, modified theories of gravity allow for the possibility of creating black holes in accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider.A team composed of Vitor Cardoso, Helvi Witek and Andrea Nerozzi from CENTRA, Carlos Herdeiro and Miguel Zilhão from Porto, Leonardo Gualtieri from Rome and Ulrich Sperhake from Caltech is decided to decipher the many secrets of black holes by using supercomputers.Their proposal, awarded with one million CPU hours in the MareNostrum Supercomputer Consortium in Spain, will focus on studying the numerical evolution of BHs in generic backgrounds, in a fully non-linear framework. These simulations include, but are not restricted to, high energy collisions between black holes, the understanding of black holes in higher dimensions and in different background spacetimes.This proposal has also been awarded an FCT grant, nr PTDC/FIS/098025/2008.