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 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. 

Recent talks and related:
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

older web pages: UofA, Caltech, UBC

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

Last updated: May 28, 2007