Davide Gerosa

University of Birmingham

Category Archives: Birmingham


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"Hitting this problem hard enough" on Scientific American

I was recently interviewed for Scientific American about my recent paper on multiple-generation black holes in stellar clusters. Here is the article: “Black Hole Factories May Hide at Cores of Giant Galaxies”. Very happy to be quoted saying “I don’t think we’ve been hitting this problem hard enough”. I think it’s a nice summary of scientific research –so much to discover!


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GrEAT PhD winter school

This week I am organizing the GrEAT PhD winter school. GrEAT (which stands for Gravitational-wave Excellence through Alliance Training) is a synergy network between the UK and China. Our program features informal talks in the mornings and hands-on sessions in the afternoons, covering both theoretical and experimental gravitational-wave physics.

After the school in Birmingham, students will move on to various UK nodes to complete longer projects. In particular, Mingyue Zhou will stay here working with me.


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Winter visitors

Two close collaborators will be visiting my group this winter.

Vijay Varma, postdoc at Caltech and expert of numerical relativity surrogate models, will be here on October 7-11. Get ready for his talk “Binary black hole simulations: from supercomputers to your laptop” (aka: Everything you ever wanted to know about waveform surrogates).

Giovanni Rosotti, Veni fellow in Leiden, will be here on November 4-15. He will also give a talk: “The observational era of planet formation“. What do planets have to do with black holes? Turns out some stages of their evolution are set by the same equations. We have a lot to learn from each other! Giovanni’s visit is supported by the GWverse COST Action (thanks EU!).


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Amplification of superkicks in black-hole binaries through orbital eccentricity

Today’s paper is about superkicks. These are extreme configurations of black hole binaries which receive a large recoil. Black hole recoils work much like those of, say, a cannon. As the cannonball flies, the cannon recoils backwards. Here the binary is shooting gravitational waves: as they are emitted, the system recoils in the opposite direction. In this paper we show that superkicks might be up to 25% larger if the binary is mildly eccentric. This means it’s a bit easier to kick black holes out of stellar clusters and galaxies.

Ulrich Sperhake, Roxana Rosca-Mead, Davide Gerosa, Emanuele Berti.
arXiv:1910.01598 [gr-qc].