Title: A deep dive into black hole mergers

Speaker: Prof. Badri Krishnan, Radbound University

Abstract: The process of black hole coalescence, where two black holes merge to form a single remnant black hole, has numerous features of interest for physicists, astronomers and mathematicians. In terms of the emitted gravitational wave signal, we observe a maximum of the luminosity and a qualitative change in the behavior of the signal. Similarly, in the strong field region, non-trivial topological changes are seen at the black hole horizons, and furthermore the infalling energy flux is seen to be strongly correlated with the emitted gravitational wave flux. In this talk I will describe both of these aspects i) a complete picture of how black horizons merge, and ii) features of the infalling post-merger gravitational wave signal which include ringdown overtones and non-linearities.