Physics Seminar
Date: Friday, 12 September 2025
Time: 12:00 p.m.
Venue: Seminar Hall
Taming eccentricity in binary black hole mergers
Tousif Islam
Kavli Postdoctoral Scholar, UC Santa Barbara.
12-09-25

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Abstract

Gravitational-wave (GW) astronomy has entered a truly data-rich era: nearly 100 binary black-hole mergers have now been observed. While most of these systems circularize before entering the LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA sensitivity band, roughly 4%—those formed via dynamical captures or three-body encounters in dense environments such as globular clusters and galactic nuclei—can retain significant eccentricity (up to 0.7). These eccentric mergers offer a direct window into dynamical formation channels, but their detection and interpretation demand waveform models and search strategies far beyond those developed for quasi-circular binaries. In this talk, I will present a unified, theory-guided, data-driven framework that bridges this gap.