Frans Pretorius

Department of Physics office: Jadwin 219
Princeton University phone: 609 258 5858
Princeton, NJ 08544 email: fpretori@princeton.edu

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.
BBH Merger Waves


BBH merger lapse function
Black String scalar field critical collapse, spherical initial data SF criticial collapse: prolateness e^2=7/8 Complex field with angular momentum, prolate initial data binary boson star merger
(a)


(b)
(c) (d) (e) (f) (g)
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

UC Davis Physics Dept Colloquium: powerpoint , pdf.    Animations:
     BBH Quasi-circular inspiral: lapse, waves
     soliton collisions: gamma= 1, 3, 4
     See Uli Sperhake's page for the high speed BH collision animations.

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

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