Sebastian Fischetti

Testing gravitational-wave searches with numerical relativity waveforms: results from the first Numerical INJection Analysis (NINJA) project

The Numerical INJection Analysis (NINJA) project is a collaborative effort between members of the numerical relativity and gravitational-wave data analysis communities. The purpose of NINJA is to study the sensitivity of existing gravitational-wave search algorithms using numerically generated waveforms and to foster closer collaboration between the numerical relativity and data analysis communities. We describe the results of the first NINJA analysis which focused on gravitational waveforms from binary black hole coalescence. Ten numerical relativity groups contributed numerical data which were used to generate a set of gravitational-wave signals. These signals were injected into a simulated data set, designed to mimic the response of the initial LIGO and Virgo gravitational-wave detectors. Nine groups analysed this data using search and parameter-estimation pipelines. Matched filter algorithms, un-modelled-burst searches and Bayesian parameter estimation and model-selection algorithms were applied to the data. We report the efficiency of these search methods in detecting the numerical waveforms and measuring their parameters. We describe preliminary comparisons between the different search methods and suggest improvements for future NINJA analyses.

AdS flowing black funnels: stationary AdS black holes with non-Killing horizons and heat transport in the dual CFT

We construct stationary non-equilibrium black funnels locally asymptotic to global AdS4 in vacuum Einstein–Hilbert gravity with a negative cosmological constant. These are non-compactly-generated black holes in which a single connected bulk horizon extends to meet the conformal boundary. Thus the induced (conformal) boundary metric has smooth horizons as well. In our examples, the boundary spacetime contains a pair of black holes connected through the bulk by a tubular bulk horizon. Taking one boundary black hole to be hotter than the other (ΔT ≠ 0) prohibits equilibrium. The result is a so-called flowing funnel, a stationary bulk black hole with a non-Killing horizon that may be said to transport heat toward the cooler boundary black hole. While generators of the bulk future horizon evolve toward zero expansion in the far future, they begin at finite affine parameter with infinite expansion on a singular past horizon characterized by power-law divergences with universal exponents. We explore both the horizon generators and the boundary stress tensor in detail. While most of our results are numerical, a semi-analytic fluid/gravity description can be obtained by passing to a one-parameter generalization of the above boundary conditions. The new parameter detunes the temperatures Tbulk BH and Tbndy BH of the bulk and boundary black holes, and we may then take and ΔT small to control the accuracy of the fluid–gravity approximation. In the small α, ΔT regime, we find excellent agreement with our numerical solutions. For our cases the agreement also remains quite good even for α ~ 0.8. In terms of a dual CFT, our α = 1 solutions describe heat transport via a large N version of Hawking radiation through a deconfined plasma that couples efficiently to both boundary black holes.

Status of NINJA: the Numerical INJection Analysis project

The 2008 NRDA conference introduced the Numerical INJection Analysis project (NINJA), a new collaborative effort between the numerical relativity community and the data analysis community. NINJA focuses on modeling and searching for gravitational wave signatures from the coalescence of binary system of compact objects. We review the scope of this collaboration and the components of the first NINJA project, where numerical relativity groups, shared waveforms and data analysis teams applied various techniques to detect them when embedded in colored Gaussian noise.

Conserved Charges in Asymptotically (Locally) AdS Spacetimes

When a physical system is complicated and nonlinear, global symmetries and the associated conserved quantities provide some of the most powerful analytic tools to understand its behavior. This is as true in theories with a dynamical spacetime metric as for systems defined on a fixed spacetime background. Chapter 17 has already discussed the so-called Arnowitt–Deser–Misner (ADM ) conserved quantities for asymptotically flat dynamical spacetimes, exploring in detail certain subtleties related to diffeomorphism invariance. In particular, it showed that the correct notion of global symmetry is given by the so-called asymptotic symmetries; equivalence classes of diffeomorphisms with the same asymptotic behavior at infinity. It was also noted that the notion of asymptotic symmetry depends critically on the choice of boundary conditions. Indeed, it is the imposition of boundary conditions that causes the true gauge symmetries to be only a subset of the full diffeomorphism group and thus allows the existence of nontrivial asymptotic symmetries at all.

Flowing funnels: heat sources for field theories and the AdS3 dual of CFT2 Hawking radiation

We construct the general (2+1)-dimensional asymptotically AdS3 solution dual to a stationary 1+1 CFT state on a black hole background. These states involve heat transport by the CFT between the 1+1 black hole and infinity (or between two 1+1 black holes), and so describe the AdS dual of CFT Hawking radiation. Although the CFT stress tensor is typically singular at the past horizon of the 1+1 black hole, the bulk (2+1)-dimensional solutions are everywhere smooth, and in fact are diffeomorphic to AdS3. In particular, we find that Unruh states of the CFT on any finite-temperature 1+1 black hole background are described by extreme horizons in the bulk.

A paucity of bulk entangling surfaces: AdS wormholes with de Sitter interiors

We study and construct spacetimes, dubbed planar AdS-dS-wormholes, satisfying the null energy condition and having two asymptotically AdS boundaries connected through a (non-traversable) inflating wormhole. As for other wormholes, it is natural to expect dual descriptions in terms of two disconnected CFTs in appropriate entangled states. But for our cases certain expected bulk entangling surfaces used by the Hubeny-Rangamani-Takayanagi (HRT) prescription to compute CFT entropy do not exist. In particular, no real codimension-2 extremal surface can run from one end of the wormhole to the other. According to HRT, the mutual information between any two finite-sized subregions (one in each CFT) must then vanish at leading order in large

Complex entangling surfaces for AdS and Lifshitz black holes

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Complete phenomenological gravitational waveforms from spinning coalescing binaries

-- though the leading-order mutual information per unit area between the two CFTs taken as wholes may be nonzero. Some planar AdS-dS-wormholes also fail to have plane-symmetric surfaces that would compute the total entropy of either CFT. We suggest this to remain true of less-symmetric surfaces so that the HRT entropy is ill-defined and some modified prescription is required. It may be possible to simply extend HRT or the closely-related maximin construction by a limiting procedure, though complex extremal surfaces could also play an important role.

Rotating black droplet

We discuss the possible relevance of complex codimension-two extremal surfaces to the Ryu?Takayanagi holographic entanglement proposal and its covariant Hubeny?Rangamani?Takayanagi generalization. Such surfaces live in a complexified bulk spacetime defined by analytic continuation. We identify surfaces of this type for BTZ, Schwarzschild?AdS, and Schwarzschild?Lifshitz planar black holes. Since the dual CFT interpretation for the imaginary part of their areas is unclear, we focus on a straw man proposal relating CFT entropy to the real part of the area alone. For Schwarzschild?AdS and Schwarzschild?Lifshitz, we identify families where the real part of the area agrees with qualitative physical expectations for the time-dependence of the appropriate CFT entropy and, in addition, where it is smaller than the area of corresponding real extremal surfaces. It is thus plausible that the CFT entropy is controlled by these complex extremal surfaces.

Covariant Constraints on Hole-ography

The quest for gravitational waves from coalescing binaries is customarily performed by the LIGO-Virgo collaboration via matched filtering, which requires a detailed knowledge of the signal. Complete analytical coalescence waveforms are currently available only for the non-precessing binary systems. In this paper we introduce complete phenomenological waveforms for the dominant quadrupolar mode of generically spinning systems. These waveforms are constructed by bridging the gap between the analytically known inspiral phase, described by spin Taylor (T4) approximants in the restricted waveform approximation, and the ring-down phase through a phenomenological intermediate phase, calibrated by comparison with specific, numerically generated waveforms, describing equal mass systems with dimension-less spin magnitudes equal to 0.6. The overlap integral between numerical and phenomenological waveforms ranges between 0.95 and 0.99.