Frans Pretorius
Research Interests
My primary field of research is
Einstein's theory of general
relativity, and I specialize in numerical solution of the field
equations. Some of my current projects include: understanding the
nature of binary black hole mergers and
the
gravitational waves emitted during the collision, critical phenomena at
the threshold of gravitational collapse, the stability and dynamics of
higher dimensional black holes, and the nature of singularities that
generically appear in black hole and cosmological spacetimes. The
non-linearity and complexity of Einstein's equations make it
challenging to solve even numerically, and some portion of my
time is spent designing algorithms to efficiently
solve the equations in parallel on large computer clusters, and
software to manipulate and visualize the simulation results.
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Animations: (a) gravitational waves
and (b) lapse function from an equal mass binary black hole merger, (c)
apparent horizon embedding diagram of an unstable 5 dimensional black
string, (d) spherically symmetric and (e) prolate scalar field critical
collapse (in spherical polar coordinates with logarithmic radial and
time coordinates), the latter showing what may be an instability of the
scalar field threshold solution, (f) complex scalar field critical
collapse with angular momentum, prolate initial data, again exhibiting
similar unstable behavior as the real field (g) a binary boson star
merger.
Some recent results:
Colliding Particles Can Make
Black Holes
ScienceNOW blurb on black hole formation in high energy particle
collisions from work with M. Choptuik.
Here are animations of successively higher energy
soliton collisions, labelled by the initial center of mass Lorentz boost factor:
1,
3,
4, the latter being
the black hole forming case depicted in the article.
No naked black holes
Science News blurb on high-energy
black hole collisions from work with U.Sperhake, V.Cardoso, E. Berti
and J.A.Gonzalez.
Some talks and related
Lecture notes and
projects
from the
PiTP Computational
Astrophysics Summer School, 2009
Talk at
XXIèmes
Rencontres de Blois: powerpoint
STScI
Colloquium: powerpoint,
pdf
Animations:
1 eccentric
orbit
1 zoom-whirl
orbit
many eccentric
orbits
many
zoom-whirl orbits
BBH merger :
lapse
BBH
merger : waves
At
Black
Holes VI workshop
in White Point, Nova Scotia:
powerpoint,
pdf
UMD physics colloquium:
powerpoint,
pdf
Slides from lecture on Numerical Relativity for AST523:
pdf
Publications: gr-qc
listing
Group Resources
Software, Hardware, and other
useful links
Links
Past and future travel schedule (from
summer 2008)
older web pages:
UofA,
Caltech,
UBC
non-physics links:
local weather,
NJ
Transit,
Lakers
schedule,
gym
calender,
Hawaii
Other affiliations
Alfred P. Sloan Research
Fellow
Affiliate Faculty,
Program
in Applied and Computational Mathematics,
Princeton University
Associated Faculty,
Department
of Mathematics,
Princeton
University
Scholar,
Canadian Institute for Advanced
Research (CIfAR)
Cosmology
and Gravity Program
Some of the material presented here is based upon work supported
in part by
the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0745779
last updated: January 25, 2010