Background
I was born in Switzerland. I have a `Laurea' degree in Mathematics
(1991) from the
University of Perugia
(Italy) and a PhD in Theoretical Physics (1996) from the
University of Bern (Switzerland).
Soon after my PhD, I joined the relativity group at
University of
Utah where I began my research in the area of binary black hole
modeling using perturbative and semi-analytic approximation techniques.
In 1998 I moved to Germany to work as a post-doctoral researcher in one
of the largest numerical relativity
group in the world, at the
Albert-Einstein
Institute (AEI) of the
Max
Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics.
At the AEI I was awarded a
Marie Curie
Fellowship to develop a novel research project, which we called
the
Lazarus approach
to
binary black hole modeling.
In 2002 I accepted a faculty appointement at
Department of Physics and Astronomy
at The University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College (
UTB/TSC), where I am now
leading a relatively new but very
competitive research group in the area of numerical
relativity. The group
presently
includes two full time faculty members, C. O. Lousto and
myself, several postdoctoral
researchers and
students, and has the exclusive
access to
a new high-performance computer cluster, named Funes. As
a faculty member at UTB, I have been teaching several courses and developed new curriculum
activities. Since 2003, I am carrying out some leading responsabilities
as Associate Director of the
Center for Gravitational Wave
Astronomy
(CGWA) and organized education and outreach activities
such as annual summer
schools for undergraduate and graduate students interested in
learning about the new field of
gravitational wave astronomy.
I also have been active in the area of grid computing through my
participation in two major NSF projects:
GriPhyN (Grid Physics Network)
and
iVDGL (International
Virtual Data Grid Laboratory). These form a consortium of 15
universities, four national laboratories, and several participating
foreign institutions connected by the world's first global
"computational grid", providing a computational resource at the
Petabyte
scale and beyond for major scientific experiments in physics,
astronomy,
biology, and engineering, including
LIGO.
Research
My research work spans the fields of relativistic astrophysics,
numerical modeling of astrophysical sources of gravitational radiation
(numerical relativity), and high-performance and grid computing.
Numerical relativity is
primarily concerned with the supercomputer simulation of massive
compact
bodies, such as binary black holes and binary neutron stars. An
accurate
model of such systems requires solving the full set of Einstein's
equations for general relativity in 3 + 1 dimensions - a mathematically
complex system of nonlinear equations relating the curvature of
space-time to the energy distribution. This is an active
area of research worldwide, and progress in this area is nowadays
considered essential for observing gravitational waves generated by
astrophysical objects such as black holes and neutron star binaries
with ground-based gravitational wave detectors such as LIGO,GEO600, VIRGO and TAMA. A NASA-planned space mission called LISA (Laser Interferometric
Space Antenna) will be hopefully launched some time around 2015 to
detect gravitational
waves from colliding supermassive black holes at the center of many
galaxies.
The numerical
relativity group which I am
leading at the Center for
Gravitational Wave Astronomy (CGWA) has several scientists
participating in it, as well as a steady stream of visitors. The group
has exclusive access to a high-performance computer cluster, named
Funes, and is active in grid computing. The group is fully supported by
NSF and NASA research grants.
 My
own research focuses on numerical simulations of astrophysical sources
of gravitational waves such as binary black hole systems. The
graphic (left figure) shows gravitational waves being produced as two
black holes spiral together and collide in a computer simulation
created few years ago at
the Max-Planck-Institute using the Lazarus
approach. This was an original idea to
`revive' a crashing numerical simulation of
Einstein's equations for colliding black holes that
were just about to form a single distorted
black hole remnant by bridging
it to approximation methods to study the final stage of the collision.
The work was featured in a picture story in the News and
Views section of Nature
(Vol. 413, Oct 2001).
For more than 30 years, the binary black
hole problem has been notoriously difficult because the computer codes
were
unstable. They crashed well before the black holes completed even a
fraction of
an orbit. Lazarus was successful because for
almost 5 years it has the only way to estimate what happen during the
final plunge of two orbiting black holes.
Just
very recently, we
published a novel idea
in Physical Review Letters, which
have now enabled our ability of simulating binary black hole
coalescences
for many
orbits. With our new techniques and codes, now known in the scientific community as
`moving punctures', we have been able to find
what is
known as the “holy grail” of numerical relativity by simulating the
merger of two massive black holes. The results have been
recently reported by the American
Institute of Physics (Physics
News Bulletin, Number 771, March
29, 2006) and have been qualified as a major
breakthrough in the field of numerical relativity and gravitational
wave astronomy (see the related Press
Release). These results not only confirmed those already obtained
with the Lazarus approach, but more importantly represent the dawn of a
“golden age of numerical
relativity”. To find more about our recent results please visit our numerical
relativity web site.
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Last update April 25, 2006
